The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Both are respectable manufacturers.

 

Well...The HIS card should be down even more in 2 - 3 weeks then. Of course now that ive said that, something will probably happen to prevent that LOL. I have this way of hexxing things 0.o Thanks for your assistance buddy I really wanna buy it now, but figuring it'll come down in a few weeks, plus being close to broke now...I just cant do it

 

Wow, Sam, I see you and omega are duking it out, lol. You're giving him a bunch of help. I just read through your reply to me, and I have to read it again even more closely, but I am running out of time today. Another better post tomorrow about the 920/940 controversy, and dual verus triple channel. See you guys then.

Edit: It's "tomorrow."

Here I am, and I forgot everybody takes off for the weekends. The real estate deal is still alive. (Just met a contractor at the house to resolve a minor termite report issue - a soft spot in one of the upstairs bathrooms - some wood rot in the sub-floor - $280 - might end up coming out of my commissions though - there goes the 940 for sure if that happens, lol.)

So the 940 vs 920 call is a hard choice - but 4.4 ghz somehow sounds a lot faster than 4.0. But you're probably right, for $229 versus about $589 or whatever it is, I'm not sure the 10% overclock improvement is worth it - no question about it, that 920 is value-priced at Microcenter.

I see, changing the subject, that you're not too gung-ho on Raid 0 - here I had thought the two heads were a big plus for speed - but you say it increases mb/s, but slows down access time. Hmmmmm.

Is it a bad idea then for gaming? I was going to have two Seagate 640 gig 7200 rpm sata drives on a raid 0, but should I just have them as drives D and E instead?

And what do I want on the faster outside edge of the drives, the operating system, or the game itself? I'm thinking not of XP - because I'm going to just ghost my xp over to the bigger drive, so I don't have to re-install all my games - but for the partitions for vista and windows 7.

Let me rephrase my question in a better way: If you advise me, as I thought maybe I read in your comments to Omega (by the way, good luck Omega at getting the coin together for a 4870, - I kind of know dude what "broke" feels like, lol.) that Raid is not worth it, then besides my boot.ini small drive C, I will have the big 640 gig drive D, and the big 640 gig drive E. Should I put the 25 gig vista and windows 7 partitions at the faster front of drive E, or at the slower inside, leaving the outside for the games?

Rich

 

Hey whats goin on... so I have a HP pavilion zx5190 notebook, radeon 9600 32 bit, 3.2 ghz, 1 gb ram, and tons of disk space...Im wondering if I can and how I would figure out which graphics changes I can make(upgrade). Also can I add a gig of pyshical to this notebook?more? any help is appreciated, sorry if I'm in the wrong place...a point in the right direction helps too.

 

I'm afraid the answer is simple:
None, it's a laptop, buy a new one.

 

Yep - no graphics changes can be made - but you probably can add another memory stick. I just picked up a dell latitude 610 off corporate lease refurbished from microcenter for $275 (orig cost $2100) 1.6ghz centrino, came with 512mb main ram, they sold a 1 gig stick for $10 that popped into the back. I suggest you download the user manual and the service manual and read the section on upgrading the memory to 2 gigs, and then see what kind of a 2gig stick is available.

Good luck!

 

Yes the Phenom II will work just fine in 780 boards. Though I don't recommend it as a few of them have heat issues due to the power draw. Get a 790FX board for Phenom II and be done with it. I'd recommend a Phenom II X3 at most for continuous use on a 780 board.

The 790FX board is much more, say, heavy duty. More heatsinks and heatpipes and better cable management design.

The Q9550 is not a bottleneck for LGA775. It's a bottleneck for 4 GPUs ;P

I've been using RAID 0 for a few years now and it does work, just not very well. Slightly better MB/s but longer access times. The Raptor drives work well with it, but it kills their access times as well. Sam is right about SSDs. They make RAID 0 worth your time

Not that I have any noticeable wait time for anything on my PC. It just takes a second longer to respond when working with big files

 

hey thanks alot....do you think the 32 bit radeon is my problem for not being able to really handle new games with high graphics or is it the ram

 

It's the whole laptop actually. It's extremely outdated and slow as a snail compared to what the newest games need. The Radeon 9600 came out in 2003. And don't even get me started on the Pentium 4. They were really poor even for their time

Any one of my PCs absolutely blows that laptop away. And even I have trouble with a few games. Get a new laptop or build a desktop.

 

Initial benchmark reports, read as you like, but since the cards are already on sale in some countries, it's not as necessary to lie....

HD4890 1GB vs HD4870 1GB
Far Cry 2 DX10
1680x1050: 9.4% benefit
1920x1080 8xAA: 12.1% benefit

Crysis DX10 benchmark all high
1680x1050: 7.5% benefit
1920x1080 8xAA: 9.5% benefit

STALKER Clear Sky
1680x1050: 10.5% benefit
1920x1080 8xAA: 18.3% benefit

FEAR 2
1680x1050: 13.3% benefit
1920x1080 8xAA: 13.5% benefit

Call of Duty World at War
1680x1050: 2.4% benefit (CPU Ceiling reached)
1920x1200 4xAA: 10.6% benefit

GRiD
1680x1050: 4.7% benefit
1920x1200 8xAA: 10.8% benefit

Average gain across 11 of 12 tests: 10.9%.
Comparative performance index
HD4850: 82
GTX260 216: 96
HD4870: 100
HD4890: 111

All in all, it's a bit of a bring-up for the HD4870 and the GTX280, and even then I don't think it's going to match it. The rival of the HD4890 does indeed look to be the upcoming GTX275.
At the moment, initial prices look to be about $250-$270. For that money you may as well save up for an HD4850X2... If you can live with the noise of course!

 

Well, I'm not hurting. My cards still blow away any of those. But only because I have crossfire XD It really doesn't make me want to go out and upgrade though. It's nice to see a refresh, but the 4890 is no upgrade if you already have a 4870.

 

Agreed, and at current prices, it's still good value to buy a 4870 anyway. Now I have finally sorted crossfire out on my system, it runs beautifully. I finally have a Quad CF PC I can start up, run a game, play it for hours, do some work, log off and go to bed happy. It's only taken me what, two months? The sad thing is that latterly it's not even ATI's drivers to blame I don't think, it's buggy Skype!

 

What are you saying Sam - skype???

Let me get this straight. (...Because the real estate deal actually closed and I can start thinking about spending money I'll get in about 15-30 days maybe, if I get all my paperwork in by then.)

You upgraded to shaff's old extreme mobo, and even though you're at 8x pci-e on both boards, you found that his board was stable running with quad crossfire - even when you left the side intake fan turned off on your Lexa and northbridge temps were 20 degrees above normal. Then, you upgraded to the HAF case, and your gpu temps dropped 20 degrees. The last I heard after that was that you said things were pretty smooth, not perfect, (not like the quote above) but the problems you were experiencing were only those that you felt were catalyst related, hopefully to be solved by future catalyst upgrades. You didn't exactly clarify what the problems were.

But now it sounds like you are saying that there ARE NO CATALYST ISSUES, and everything is smooth - and it sounds like you figured out that you had some buggy skype software that was the source of those last few problems you had been having???

If you are really running problem free - then I am ecstatic!!

Would you be so kind as to itemize a short list of the gotchas to avoid - in other words - the things you have learned in the two months of hard work and frustration you just went through? I would think that #1 on the list would be - "get a high-end motherboard with superior chip cooling - expect to pay $300 and up." But correct me if I am wrong about that.

Estuansis - back to your testing laboratory. Your testing led you to conclude that Sam's experience of not being able to see any difference running the cards on 16x versus 8x (whereas you saw a very distinct difference) meant to you that his Q9550 was a 4gpu cf bottleneck on the 775 platform (meaning 775 + quad cf, that's what I meant when I referred to the 775.)

As fast as the Q9550 is, Sam indicated that he thought he might actually have to agree with your conclusion.

Since I am shortly going to have a little pile of cash coming up, and I will be diving into 1366 with that DFI board with the 4 slot spacing between the two 16x CF boards, then learning from your impressive testing, Jeff, I want to try to avoid bottlenecking my quad CF.

Which makes me think I should seriously consider springing for the 940, not the 920, for that extra 10% of overclocking that Sam was mentioning - 4.4 versus 4.0 - if I can figure out the DFI bios and keep my case cool. What do you guys think?

One last thought - I have been away from the forum for about a week, and now there's a new chip out I see, the 4890. I presume the 4890x2 is on its way. I haven't bought zip yet, and I won't have any cash for 15-30 days anyway - should I wait for the 4890x2?

Rich

 

Right, well, with Catalyst 9.1 and 9.2 there were serious bugs that made the PC unusable, in 9.1 you would get games randomly crashing to desktop, faulting atiumdag.dll, whenever they tried to save/load. In 9.2, you would randomly get VPU recovers as if your graphics card was overclocked. In 9.3, the only bug that's a problem is the lack of Powerplay until you open and close a game (9.2 had this as well), except, if you use the new skype, games won't open, they just minimise to desktop as soon as they're launched as if you had pressed Alt-tab. Skype are meant to have made a patch for this, but you can fix it by using 'old windows mode' which looks the same, and doesn't randomly put the minimise, restore and Close buttons on their own at the bottom left corner of the screen for no apparent reason. That I assume, is part of the bug.
As I mentioned, Quad CF certainly works now, no blackscreens after changing to the Asus, and no crashes or silliness with 9.3, but P45 is still apparently holding me back in certain games, primarily Mirrors Edge. Ultimately, apart from performance being lacklustre in Far Cry 2 and Mirrors Edge (and Far Cry 2 doesn't really support Quad CF at all anyway), the actual function of the system is perfect, no hiccups all week. Crysis Warhead runs badly, but it always did, so no surprises. CW is still the only game that's CPU bottlenecked by my Quad though, now I have Quad CF, a few games I thought were CPU-bound, turns out are less affected than I thought.

To help you out, here's what not to do to have a relatively trouble-free Quad CF system?

1. Don't use a Gigabyte board (at least, not for S775)
2. Use a good PSU (preferably Zalman ZM850-HP or ZM1000-HP)
3. Have a well-cooled case (big front, rear, side fan)
4. Use 9.3 drivers, no earlier
5. Install the drivers with one card installed, add the second and bridge afterwards
6. Don't use an Engineering sample card with a DFI motherboard
7. Don't mess with any PCI express settings in the BIOS, they aren't needed, voltages included

As for the 4890X2, can you wait that long? It'll be at least a month...

Specs now updated with new image.

 

Hey sam or anyone. Are you running Vista, and running RivaTuner? Because, the program itself seems to be fine on windows 7, but during the install it said something like Driver not digitally signed. And now I dont get those driver level settings in riva tuner! The settings THAT I WANT! Is there any way to turn off this function in windows vista, 7, etc? The function that warns about digital signature! I dont download stupid ...STUFF, so im not worried about digital sigs. Any help MUCH appreciated! Thanks in advance

 

Yeah, it was hard to install, I forget how I did it, I'll try and find out for you.

 

Appreciate that buddy! The 8600GT is the lowest score in my windows 7 experience. Im just curious how much I can raise it. While learning a bit at the same time

 

During install this is the message it gives me.

 

Well...I found the way to deactivate the Nasty "digital signature required" bugger, in windows 7!
1. Start --->> Run ---> GPEdit.msc

2. Enable and Ignore Code signing for drivers policy under User Configuration --->>

Administrative Templates ---->> System ---->> Driver Installation --->> Code signing for drivers
Worked like a charm!
However, I still cannot enter driver level settings.

 

Correct. The program doesn't work as the driver isn't installed, You need to reinstall the program. The unsigned driver block works at install level.