Tuesday 27 October 2015

BB68 - Show me yours and I'll show you mine

Eve Blog Banter 68 - This is My Rig.

This is my Rig, There are Many Like it...
What do you play Eve on? I'll show you mine if you show me yours! Are you pew-pewing on a laptop? Plotting universal domination on a 12 monitor set up? Mining away on a 50" TV? Is your set up located where your other half can speak to you or do you lock yourself away for hours in your Eve themed shed? How do you play your important internet spaceships?


TL; DR; The executive summary-pictures will save you a thousand words:


Obsolescence cycles of PC hardware dictates a functional but sane mid range type build summarized to the left.

Not much to add here - not shown is the Gigabyte Z97N Wifi Mini ITX motherboard and 2 x 1 terabyte spinning disks (non raid).

Went with Kubuntu 14.04 here for the LTS - my first Debian based installation at home - favoured Red Hat based up until now.

I still run Fedora 21 on the laptop, but will probably also reinstall this soon.




The graphics card is the only somewhat above average item in the build (or was at the time of purchase).

At that stage there was a possibility that we might have to explore GPU processing at work and I used that as an excuse to convince the wife.

GPU processing didn't pan out but the graphics card stays.













When I travel I "play" on a laptop.

An older 15.6 inch ASUS K53S machine set up for work, not gaming.

Intel i7-2670QM CPU @ 2.2 GHz running Fedora 21.

8GiB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GT520MX (1GB) graphics completes the package.










The side-on view of  the techni-coloured mini ITX case with some of the paraphernalia exposed if you are into that sort of thing.

800 Watt PSU because at peak the GeForce GTX 780 draws 42 Amp and resulted in brownouts when I only had a 600 Watt PSU.










In normal EVE sessions I play on two 23 inch Samsung SyncMaster S23B300 monitors running 1920 x 1080 resolution @ 60Hz.


Cheap Logitech K120 keyboard and matching mouse.




It is just the wife and I in our household despite me being in my early forties and my wife in her middle-late thirties.

In our previous house my "office" was set up in a spare room but this meant that we were often separated when I was working late or playing EVE.

In our new abode, the computer workstations are set up in the open plan living space.  The laptop on the left and the Swiss ball are hers not mine.  When things get really serious and I need another screen/client I will squeeze my laptop into the space where the coffee mugs are in the picture.  



The boss is a sports scientist and does not play eve.  Calls us nerds.

She does understand a fair bit about the game though.  In addition, she can see and hear everything that goes on on my side.  Boy did I cop an earful when I went ganking the other day...






5 comments:

  1. Very neat :) I don't expect many play on Linux based systems.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I've got a number of questions! Are you playing through Steam? If so, how well does it work? And why did you transition from Red Hat to Kubuntu? I've used Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS (server and Desktop) for 14 or 15 years and the few times I've tested out desktop installs of Ubuntu have driven me a little crazy.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Cle - ask away!
      1)Steam: No I don't use Steam. I have heard good things, but sadly I have too little time to play too many games (currently just EVE) and have not explored Steam. Heard good things about it though.

      2)I have been a long time Red Hat user (the community editions - CentOS and Fedora). CentOS' claim to fame is stability - and make no mistake it is very very good. It does come at a price though - older "stable" packages. CentOS 6 for instance is still using kernel 2.6.xx. My i7 4470K intel chip requires kernel 3.10 to be fully supported - when I first build the PC CentOS 7 was not released and I ended up running Fedora 20. Fedora is ok, but only supported for 6 months before FedUP/reinstall.

      CentOS 7 is at least running kernel 3.10. But my requirements have also moved on. Fedora 21 is still in vogue, but 22 is now beta. I wanted something a little bit longer term on the desktop...

      So I was drawn to the LTS for ubuntu. Somewhat up to date, not bleeding edge but not archaic. I have used it before (I actually prefer debian if going debian based, but at work they now use ubuntu on servers, so there are some advantages to be had for testing/dev software when environments are similar).

      I get you on the switch from rpm/yum based to deb/apt based. Also the philosophies are a little different as to where what goes. All I can say is so far so good.

      I will see what goes on the laptop - as I work mostly on the desktop, the I can afford some downtime on the laptop every now and then for a FedUP or reinstall. Maybe Fedora 22 when it comes, but I have also been playing with PC-BSD in a virtual machine - also looking nice but a whole new system to get used to again. On the downside it supports even less than CentOS 7 in some departments!

      Delete
  3. Hi! I've sent you an email sometime ago, but did not get any answer. Can you check and get back to me if still interested in giving me a hand to properly move to Linux :).

    http://cloakybastard.blogspot.se/2015/12/linux-and-eve-struggle.html?showComment=1450948006718#c7152407356622372674

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Zosius

      I responded to the email address that you sent the query on, but I gather it did not arrive? I have just forwarded the reply again - please let me know if you received it... Maybe spam filters zaps me or something?

      Delete

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.