Machinima Update

As my readers may have noticed, I haven’t quite kept up my plan of giving one weekly blog entry pertaining to my machinima creation goal. The biggest reason for this is that World of Warcraft had been performing less than smooth for me. Consistent, debilitating lag spikes made it next to impossible to even play the game, let alone film anything in it. After spending a lot of time talking with my more tech-savvy friends and tinkering with in-game settings (to no avail), I installed over-clocking software to see what temperature my video card was running. The answer: one hundred and twenty degrees Celsius. Oh my. Luckily silicon has a higher melting point than water does boiling point.

Now, my video card is relatively new – I purchased it this last summer when my other one overheated. Although the former card burned out, I had zero reason to think the new one would because my air conditioning unit was broken over the summer and my apartment was frequently 85-90 degrees Fahrenheit. So the old card had a good reason to overheat; the new card does not. After more consultation, the last ditch effort to remedy the heat situation (which I was informed was more than likely the cause of the previously unexplainable lag) was to clean my box.

Dust bunnies flew out of my tower like the timid creatures they are. I don’t mean to hyperbolize, but it seemed as though a cat had vomited in my computer. There was quite a bit of dust. After a thorough spritzing with canned air, I ran the software again to check the temperature: eighty five Celsius idle, and one hundred ten in game. Thankfully ten degrees makes a lot more difference in a computer than it sounds like it should. While the post-cleaned card still ran quite hot (my friend’s runs around sixty five idle), the lag issue was gone. Hurray!

With the system specs a bit old (I purchased the comp in 2003 as a high school graduation gift to myself) at 1.5gb RAM with a 3.0mhz processor, the only question remains whether my setup will be able to manage the very taxing process of Fraps’ing ( Fraps is the software used to film in the game) and rendering the movie. The only way to find out is to do it, and I guess that’s my next step. Hopefully I will find time this week to give it a try, but as I’ve contracted bronchitis, my readers may have to wait longer.