Podcast, PTR, PC Woes

Episode 209

I realized that I published Episode 209 of the podcast everywhere but here. For consistency’s stake I’ll do a separate post later, but 209 was a great show. A big thanks to special guest RogerBrown, and a warm welcome back to ArtemisHowl. We discussed many things on the show, but nothing was better than listening to those two talk about what it was like to participate in the Highmaul race for World First.

Episode 210 is currently planned for Sunday, February 1st at 10:00 am Eastern.

PTR 6.1 Build 19508

Patch 6.1 is in full swing on the PTR. They released some class tuning changes, but nothing much for Hunters. If you saw the patch notes on MMO-Champion, they were all tooltip changes, except for maybe Barrage, and it’s not clear if it was buffed, nerfed or stayed the same.

We’re still early in the patch cycle so there may yet be some real Hunter changes.

PC Woes

In more personal news, my three year old PC is dying a slow death. Back in November my GPU died and I replaced my dead NVIDIA GTX 570 with a honking GTX 970. Sadly it now appears to be on life support. I suffered a couple of severe BSODs this week. In both cases my PC recovered just fine upon reboot. Last night, however, I was greeted with a single monitor, grainy 800 x 600 resolution after boot up. The system still recognized the graphics card, but disabled it with a code 43.

I figured the problem was either the card, the PCIE slot or the power supply unit (PSU). I tried putting the card in a different slot, but that only made things worse. I tried using different power cables from the PSU, but that didn’t help either. I finally cannibalized an NVIDIA GTX 560 from a much older PC. It is that ancient piece of hardware that is allowing me to write this post.

I’m not sure what my next step will be. What I do know is my system has fried one GPU, and possibly a second in short amount of time, so a dead GPU may be the symptom of a larger problem. I’ll be curious to see how this one holds up, although I hope to have a permanent resolution before I have time to find out.

Happy Friday!