Gaming: PS2 on HDMI trough your computer!

So you have all these cool PS2 games but you have no hardware that supports a composite cable anymore, do you? No, all you have is HDMI, DVI and maybe VGA. Well there's a reasonable solution to all this!

I got something called EasyCap, which is a capturing device that goes into the a USB2 port. On the installation disk is drivers and Ulead Visual Studio. The serial code is printed on the CD.

Here's how it looks: (the black cable is a S-Video cable)

The only drawback with this cheap device is that the sound capture chip only does 8Khz mono. So what i did was attach a female-to-two-male cable from the PlayStation into my stereo. Here's my Visio skillz for the schematics:

BAM, you get good sound. They look like this: (Obviously they probably need to be longer!)

So far I have not been able to get a widescreen live capture going on in Ulead Visual Studio, but it might be some configuration thing somewhere (The program asks you on startup if you want 16:9). Maybe it is EasyCap that can't do 16:9.

Anyway, the 4:3 picture I got on the 27" 1920x1080 from the humble PS2 was at least very impressive.

My new gaming rig!

CoolerMaster HAF 922 bigtower with built in glass panel side

2x 120mm fans on top. I managed to break a blade on the original 200x200x3 fan! Have a spare fan you want to donate?! :D

Specs:

• Gigabyte FXA990 UD7
• Intel 80GB SSD disk for system
• Samsung 160Gb SATA disk for data (I also moved all User directories to this drive to save space on the SSD. I can teach you how if you want!)
• 16 Gb 1600 Mhz RAM
• Phenom II X6 1100T CPU
• 2x Sapphire Radeon 6790 in Crossfire
• NXZT 5-fan controller
• Kingston dual fan RAM cooler
• Noctua SE CPU fan
• Gbit Ethernet with 9K Jumbo frames
• 24" BenQ HDMI LCD
• Manually BIOS-overclocked to 220 FSB. (So RAM goes as 1740 and CPU at 3.3Ghz I think.
• 2x 250GB Hitachi SATA 3.0Gbit in RAID0 on the Marvell ports
• 1x 320GB Hitachi SATA Deskstar 3.0Gbit
• 2x USB3 ports
• 7.1 Surround
• 6x USB2 ports with 2x power
• ESATA connector
• Corsair 750W V1 PSU

Front View

At the most, this monster draws about 500 Watts and seems to run smoothly.
One thing, the 6790 cards can be safely overclocked to 880 core speed, but do NOT mess with the Memory Speed clocks. That will get you BSODS. Also, I dont think it's completely stable on core speed 900Mhz.

A little note about the 6790 and CrossFire, it seems that you need to restart CrossFire before starting any games about half the time. Otherwise I get a flickering screen 50% of the time.

I am running Sapphire Trixx and enabled card syncing and disabled UPLS. That is supposed to do the trick. But not always it seems.

Also, if you happen to buy this motherboard and you have a Phenom II X4 960T, it will actually fit in the AM3 slot and works perfectly if your mobo has BIOS v7 or newer. (the 960T is the last of it's kind to do this. It has *both* DDR2 and DDR3 memory controllers.

I broke my 960T and had to get a new one, thats why I have a 1100T. But I fixed the broken pin on the 960T and put it back into it't proper AM2+ motherboard!

Old gaming rig rebuilt to RAID diskmonster!

So this is my main diskmonster rig:

•  MSI K9A2+ Mobo
• 460W PSU at the moment
• 4 Gb Kingston HyperX 1066
• Phenom II X4 960T
• GeForce 8800GT
• 2x SiL SATAPATA cards ( 320GB RAID 10,  120GB RAID 1, 640GB RAID 0)
• 1x WD 250GB IDE drive
• 1x Maxtor 40GB IDE for booting (Gonna move the user dirs soon, only 19 gigs free here!)
• Gbit ethernet
• 1TB IoMega USB external drive
• 2TB WD USB external drive
• About as many fans as I could fit in there.
• A total of 10 disks!

Notes about the PCI SiL0680 SATAPATA cards: These needs to be flashed with a downloadable BIOS to enable RAID modes. This is originally just a quad channel IDE controller. But with the flashing, you get RAID modes 0,1 and 10. This is one of those 'Medley' RAID cards and it seems they are even bootable but i can't confirm that yet.

Also the gfx card in the picture is not the 8800, it's out for de-dusting. That card is just an old 64MB PCIe2.0 Nvidia card i had lying around.

The rig in it's current state draws about 180 Watts of power.