Apple

I played FFXI for a while, and I though I didn't get far (level 30), I really enjoyed my character so I am going to resub with 11 and attempt to import it. Those graphics are fancy though, I wonder how my character will look...

I played FFXI way back before the WoW launch (2003-2004); had a Mithra named Koyori with kind of an orange bowl cut. I can't find any screenshots though.

Well, I went through a lot of working tying my ffxi account to my ffxiv account and getting it all linked to find no benefit at all. Not sure what happened there, but maybe its a release only thing. I made a new character on your server. I didn't quite get the Orange to Red server markings, but all of them had the same symbols so I just picked your server (Wutai). My characters name is Billaba Dia and it looks pretty similar to the old Billaba.

Now is it just me or is this game an excuse to buy a 2010 Mac Pro fully loaded? Damn its laggy at 1920x1200 on my gaming rig (Phenom 9950BE, ATI 5830). I can't tell if its server lag or not. It seems like its hardware related, I bumped it down to high settings on 1680x1050 (1920x1080 does not look right on this HP 25.5" lcd) and that helped a lot but I still get lag in the more popular areas. My server tick icon goes from green to yellow though in those areas, so it could be my crappy DSL at that point. I overclocked my cpu to almost 3GHz from 2.6 and bumped up my gpu 100mhz and saw no performance difference in the game though.

I hope a lot of it is because of the beta nature of the whole (the game being beta, and ati not having support for the game in the drivers).

It performs well for me, but it does seem to rely on an extremely fast graphics card like a HD5870 or GTX 480. It also works much better with a gamepad rather than keyboard/mouse.

I've been playing around with a few different classes and completed some leves; nothing in depth as of yet. I figure it won't do much good to go hog wild until the 22nd

I am hoping some driver optimization will save the day...

Here's a shot of the HD5870 installed in the Mac Pro. I still have the GTX480 I posted earlier; if the Mac drivers improve I'm certainly open to reinstalling it. At the moment, the only existent Fermi Mac drivers are the ones leaked (and subsequently pulled) by Nvidia back in June. They offer only a fraction of the performance they should.

The HD5870 is solid and speedy under both Mac OS X and Windows 7 so no worries either way

I also cloned over my boot drive to a 2TB WD Caviar Black WD2001FASS which should up the performance a bit. Not quite a Velociraptor, but reviews do compare favorably.

Oooh, I build a machine with 4 of those disks in it. They are surprisingly heavy.

Yeah, they are the next best thing and offer a ton of space. I was considering changing my config to 1x150gb velociraptor as boot and the a 1 or 2TB Black for storage.

Yep, I noticed that when I was swapping drives around - quite a bit heavier

Got the FFXIV release yesterday; wound up changing my server to Melmond and character name to Mitty Fortin. Looks the same though.

I also picked up a Microsoft XBox 360 wireless controller for Windows (comes with a USB transmitter and standard XBox 360 controller). The game is a lot easier to use with it.

I didn't pick it up, when I do I will definitely be switching servers though. My connection to Wutai was full flame so I take it that was bad as it was almost unbearable.

unixmuseum wrote: Hi Neko, long time no talk... I'm curious about a few things regarding the MP: how's the 5870 compared to the 4870? I have an Apple 512MB 4870 in my MP1,1...

Since posting the above I actually bought an official HD 5870 from Apple (mostly so I could use my mini DisplayPort equipped LED display without an adapter), but the performance is otherwise identical to a flashed card. I've found it to be much faster than the 4870 for gaming and general 3D usage in both Mac OS and Windows. The extra VRAM also helps tremendously in things like Second Life that really load up on textures.

unixmuseum wrote: BTW, I read a little about the AHCI thing, what benefit is there in doing so (and yes, my Win7 drive is a 150GB Velociraptor )? My understanding is that the drives are treated as IDE without AHCI, but in what sense? Performance-wise the Windows experience is a disapointing 5-something, which shocked me for a 10,000RPM drive, that might be it, uh?

The biggest benefit to the AHCI hack is that it enables Windows to detect and utilize the two auxiliary SATA ports on the motherboard. This is necessary if adding something like a second SATA optical drive (such as blu-ray) - without AHCI enabled the drive won't be detected through Windows at all.

Unfortunately the 5-score is to be expected; Microsoft has apparently made it so the Windows 7 Experience awards a maximum of 5 to any drive that is not an SSD.

nekonoko wrote: Since posting the above I actually bought an official HD 5870 from Apple (mostly so I could use my mini DisplayPort equipped LED display without an adapter), but the performance is otherwise identical to a flashed card. I've found it to be much faster than the 4870 for gaming and general 3D usage in both Mac OS and Windows. The extra VRAM also helps tremendously in things like Second Life that really load up on textures.

OK, so that might be a worthwhile upgrade... I wish there were some "clean" nVidia solutions, I'm using CAD tools on Win7, and ATI has always had some issues with OGL CAD applications that nVidia never had... BTW, are you interested in parting with your flashed 5870?

nekonoko wrote: The biggest benefit to the AHCI hack is that it enables Windows to detect and utilize the two auxiliary SATA ports on the motherboard. This is necessary if adding something like a second SATA optical drive (such as blu-ray) - without AHCI enabled the drive won't be detected through Windows at all.

Got it, that's what I thought... Might still be useful though... The process doesn't seem horrible at all...

nekonoko wrote: Unfortunately the 5-score is to be expected; Microsoft has apparently made it so the Windows 7 Experience awards a maximum of 5 to any drive that is not an SSD.

I might just do that... Just need one of these $30 Icy Docks, and migrate the HD to SSD and be on my way...

AHCI install worked like a charm as expected... As you said, neko, the 2 extra SATA ports showed up in Device Manager...
Windows Experience is at 5.9 for the Velociraptor, I think it's higher than what I remember, but maybe it's wishful thinking...

Yep, 5.9 is what I have as well on my standard hard drive. Now that you have the extra ports enabled, you could also grab one of OWC's eSATA extenders to route those extra ports to the rear of the machine:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer%20 ... y/MPQXES2/

Unfortunately I no longer have the flashed 5870; I sold it so the swap to the Apple 5870 was nearly at no-cost. The only spare cards I have right now are a Mac-flashed 4870/1GB and a PC-BIOS GTX 280 (was in my Hackintosh before replacing with a GTX 480).

After a few days with Intel's Storage Matrix Manager 8.9, I can say there is whole lot of data corruption going on
Maybe the MS AHCI is just good enough...

I haven't run into any data corruption myself; I've been running with same 1TB drive and Intel driver since December 2009.

nekonoko wrote: I haven't run into any data corruption myself; I've been running with same 1TB drive and Intel driver since December 2009.

Nice... My Win7 on the 150GB Raptor took an ugly dump

If you're dual booting, make certain you're not enabling NTFS write support on the Mac side as that's been known to cause data corruption.

nekonoko wrote: If you're dual booting, make certain you're not enabling NTFS write support on the Mac side as that's been known to cause data corruption.

I haven't touched it... Seems stable so far... One thing I noticed though is that once AHCI is enabled, the the bootcamp control panel refuses to come up since it can't find the boot drives... Only way I could make the control panel come up is by inserting a DVD in the DVD ROM... The control panel shows up, naturally not showing any of the drives... The "restart from Mac OS" doesn't work, but all I wanted to do was changing the function key behavior, so that's OK... A bit of a PITA though

I installed rEFIt (an EFI boot menu) to make that less painful:

http://refit.sourceforge.net/