If Atomic was a mag about deep-sea diving (or escaping submarines) we’d have a tutorial on how you could build your own hyperbaric chamber. We’re willing to bend backward every once in a while, but nitrogen poisoning isn’t that fun. The Logitech MX500 is though, and IOOTM will get one of these optical delights. Hey, it’s better than bubbles in the blood.
IOOTM: Woozy gamer
I: I'm a typical gamer who really enjoys my gaming, however I get a massive headache (my friends call it motion sickness) after playing 15-30 minutes of games like Unreal Tournament 2003, Quake 3, Doom, or Jedi Outcast, which require 360 degree eye movement. However, when I play favorites such as Virtua Tennis, Dynamite Cop, or any of the Street Fighter series, I can play for hours with no headache. Is there something wrong with me, and if there is, what can I do to fix it?
Stephen Quoy
O: You've 'simulator sickness', and it's quite common, though triggers and symptoms vary.Basically, motion sickness of all kinds is caused by input to the brain that doesn't add up.
Usually, it's because your view of the world is changing orientation, but your inner ear and proprioceptive senses (the senses that inform you of where your body parts are) tell you you're not moving, or at least not moving in the same way as the view. The result is usually nausea, but headaches are quite common as well.
Simulator sickness -- which some people called "DOOM Induced Motion Sickness", or DIMS, when it first hit the news -- usually comes from perceiving a moving world on your monitor, but not actually moving. Quite a lot of simulator sickness sufferers seem to get it when they first start playing FPS games, then get over it quickly. Some, like you, don't.
There are things you can try that may help. Basically, you want to give your brain visual stimuli that tell it you're not moving. If you play in a dark room, light it up; have plenty of obviously stationary visible stuff around the monitor. If you have a huge monitor and/or sit very close to the screen, move back, so the moving image takes up less of your field of view.
Here are a couple of papers on simulator sickness, in case you're interested:http://www.hitl.washington.edu/scivw/kolasinski/http://www.stricom.army.mil/PRODUCTS/TDT/simsick.jsp
Decorative metal
I: In my quest to pump out as much performance as possible from my system I have been looking at getting video RAM sinks, but remembered that the bible states that they wouldn't do much, if anything (issue 23 and issue 24 of Atomic).Why is this so? Surely having RAM sinks sitting on my video memory with a case fan blowing a breeze over them from outside the box would help me push a few more cycles and put a bigger smile on my face. I am new to overclocking, but cannot see how this couldn't help. I understand it won't let my 9500 PRO outshine every other card on and off the market, but it should be able to make it a little better.
Brett McKenzie
O: RAM sinks would help, a bit. A very little bit. The clock speed ceiling difference is likely to only be a few per cent, and that'll barely even add up to anything measurable in any real world test. X percent more RAM speed does not give you X per cent more system speed.
Putting RAM sinks on video card memory is more sensible than putting them on system memory, because video RAM is clocked faster and runs hotter. Even high-clocked video card RAM isn't at all likely to manage more than 10% higher clock speeds with heat sinks than it does without, though.
For reference, a quite pessimistic estimate of the heat output from the memory on an eight-DDR-RAM-chip, 128MB video card that's being heavily used is about seven watts. That's from all of the chips put together; each individual chip will be emitting less than a watt. Possibly a lot less.
Less than a watt per chip simply doesn't make them very warm. The difference between just blowing a breeze over the RAM, and adding heat sinks to the chips and then blowing the same amount of air over it, closely approaches zero.
Why do lots of video cards come with heat sinks on the RAM, then? Well, a few percent is a few percent, and heat sinks allow the RAM a little more thermal leeway, so the card will be a little more stable at stock speed in a poorly-ventilated PC.
The main reason for the RAM sinks, though, is just that they look cool.
Chilly storage
I: I have been reading on the tech forums, and I have heard people say that if your HDD is dead, pop it in the freezer for half an hour and it should work for long enough to get your files off. Do you know how this works? I have tried it and it does work, but am puzzled about why.
Duncan Murray
O: Freezing isn't a miracle cure, but yes, it can bring some dead drives back for a brief period. Theories vary on why this works -- differential contraction freeing up bearings, contracting platters increasing head clearance -- but it indubitably, sometimes, does.If you take an ice-cold drive out of the freezer, it'll shortly be covered, inside and out, with condensation. Water droplets on drive platters are a Bad Thing. To avoid this problem, you can try attaching power and data cables to the drive and then putting it in a zip-loc bag, sealing the opening as well as you can, so it's not got too much air from which water can condense. If you can manage it, you could also try running the power and data cables from the PC right into the freezer, and running the drive (which should at least be sitting on some newspaper or something, not on a bare ice-covered shelf. . .) while it's in there!
Peltier power
I: I've been building a PC with a Peltier device cooling a water system for some time, and recently had to do some wondering. I was told that an 80-watt Peltier (around 6.6 amps at 12 volts) would run off the PSU, when I had installed a six amp transformer to drive it. The transformer I installed is about eight times the size of the one in the PSU, and even the wiring in the PSU doesn't seem able to handle six amps.
Although the PSU is rated at 300 watts, most of this is available to the 5V rail. Yet the PSU says that eight amps is available to the 12V rail. How can such high amperage be available from such a small transformer in the PSU, and will it run the Peltier device and the computer together?
Peter Harries
O: The two power supplies look so different because they work in quite different ways.Your 'transformer' is, I presume, actually a linear power supply, which contains a big transformer, but also has a bridge rectifier and a smoothing capacitor or three, and probably a voltage regulator as well.
Linear power supplies are simple and quite safe and don't emit any electromagnetic interference. But they're not very efficient, and they have to be big and heavy, because of that big transformer.
Your computer's PSU, on the other hand, is a switch-mode power supply, which is a lot more complex than the linear supply. Its little transformer is a very high frequency device, which is why it can be so much smaller, and the whole PSU is much more efficient than the linear supply. It produces some electromagnetic interference, but you can't have everything.
By the way, the standard current rating for the 18AWG (American Wire Gauge) wire that most PSUs use for their drive power cables is nine amps.
If you had a very beefy PSU, then you could indeed run your Peltier from it; a 550-watt rated PSU, for instance, would probably be good for more than 20 amps on the 12V rail. Your current PSU isn't likely t
Issue: 137 | June, 2012