Dual Sport Surgeon ZeroXR – Cars and Computers

So… Friday was one busy day filled with projects.

After work, I made haste to visit Track Dog Racing in Dallas for Devil’s part. After paying Gary for the coil packs, I would wait for the engine to cool enough so I could just get in, change out the coils and then go home. There were a few Mazda engineer snags like tape and zip ties, but the guys out at Track Dog helped with those as I bolted in the coils. After the coils were in, the moment of truth was upon me. I was to take Devil around and make sure throttle response was stable again as well as ignition. A test run of about 5 minutes showed all systems were normal and I was relieved.

From there… I sped back home to Plano to hit up Comp USA for a few things for Byakko (the desktop computer for those confused with my nomenclature). I would pick up a GeForce GTS 250 by XFX, 4GB of DDR2 OCZ ReaperX HPC RAM, and 4 more USB ports to plug them up… This is where the real fun began.

The fitment of the Geforce GTS 250 into my Micro ATX board was a little tight but manageable. It does show how much real estate disappears when you have a graphic card that eats 2 slots… That for me was essentially one PCI slot gone. After the parts were in… it was then time to power it all up and behold the glory…

I decided to try to “benchmark” my games on fluid playback… and surprisingly… Most of my games had decided to set themselves to “High” settings and played without any choppy frame rates. This is probably the first time I have ever seen “modern” games coming even close to looking decent. Sure there was some behind the scenes tweaking with drivers and stuff, but it was highly rewarding to say the least.

The funny part is just how in common fixing up cars and computers are… The fact I got to play in both worlds was rather rewarding. Devil being back to tip-top shape as well as my computer being in excellent condition made things far more sweeter.

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