The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Rich: I'm selling the 3007, only way I can afford the 3008

 

Precisely my point, mate. What do you want for it?

 

Already sold buddy, sorry. Sold it for £500 to a mate

 

LOL that was quick. What did you pay for it? Any profit?

Yep. Making some money this weekend. Going to be building a <$500 budget office/media rig for a friend and he's giving me $100 to do it. I'm a nice guy so I gave him a deal

 

Blimey!

Well shipping to the "new world" would probably have cost a fortune anyway Hahahaha.

Man, I had my best ever COD4 session the other night after a few hours of warmup. The little 3850 has pushed my 3dmarks up near 5,000. Don't laugh all you guys, remember it's still just a p4. Until the new build it will have to do. And I'm coming up from 2270, so that's a big performance gain for me. Anyway, the other thing I did is increase my agp aperture, or "shared vga memory" in bios to max, 128, per the tweaking guide that Ati Tray Tools recommends. Somehow it had gotten all the way down to 32 - don't know how that happened - probably when I reflashed the bios about 6 months ago. That's probably why I had in-game pauses of 2-3 seconds very often, esp on BF2.

I'm going to be reading that tweaking guide - all 300 pages - from cover to cover over the next couple of weeks.

So I gave up for now on 1600x1200, dropped the res to 1280x1024 as the game suggested, and went further and turned all settings to low. Hey, don't give me sh*t, all the shader 3.0's are firing, unlike with the x850xtpe, and the game looks good. But the best was the fps - maybe the aperture helped - I was getting good 40-50, sometimes dipping to low 30's, and the game play was smooth, and no periodic stuttering like before. And after a few hours messing with some different guns, I went back to my trusty p90 silenced, ammo, stopping power, and steady aim.

I walked out many times like Max Payne on the main street of District, smoothly moving from side to side, taking out those op-fors trying to hide above the newspaper stand, in the shop, everywhere. I love the way steady aim sights in and you don't have to right-click unless they're over 100 feet away.

Many times I had 4 kills but never got a bombing raid - ended up highest on my 8-man team at 40 kills, 32 deaths, next highest at 32 kills. (A far cry from those gaming days I have many times when I can't cuss loud enough at how I'm getting raped lol!) I called it a night a few maps after that - but that was definitely a thrill. LOL

 

lol

I think it was 2 years ago when me and Sam were competing to get to 7000 points! That was a lot back then haha. And then I bought a 8800GTX and annihilated his benchmarks.

 

Yeah I remember. He was 7000 marks - the king. Then you thoroughly humiliated him and he has never forgotten it which is why HE SPENDS EVERY DIME ON MORE EQUIPMENT!! LOL

 

lol

I beat him every once in a while. But I need to spend money on other stuff like clothes, he doesn't haha. He just spends it all on his precious gem of a computer hahaah

 

Not really, threw the idea of getting a 3008 around a week or so back when I spotted my 3007 had a few dead pixels
It's actually going to the owner of the very 3007 that made me buy one, JLH. he's a rich guy, so he wants one for work as well as

home. he's not stupid, so I have him a nice deal
I've since played Halo 3, Rock band and Super Mario Galaxy on my 3008, as well as Crysis and UT3. It's incredible. I really did miss

out getting the 3007 doing this. That said, the 3008's panel is certtainly not what the 3007's was. It's gone the way of faster

refresh rate, worse image quality, which is a shame. This is nonsense as the image quality is still ludicrous compared to your

standard TN-panel LCDs, but its black levels aren't quite so good, and viewing at any angle other than 0-10 degrees sees a significant

brightness change - no colour degradation at all, but everything goes a bit white. On the other hand, I never knew how warm the colour was on the 3007. The 3008's colour is very cool by comparison, and I've manually reduced the green and blue to 'redden' it a bit. Colour accuracy is now pretty impressive. Another negative, it does overheat. Fortunately, that only happened when I set it to 75% brightness though, and honestly, anyone who uses a screen this brig that bright is basically staring into a light bulb. 50% is more than enough, it's set to 0% now and is plenty bright enough for me, that should sum it up!
Long and short, although it's slightly scratched (I'm going to claim some money back off for that, they seem quite willing to oblige), my 3008 is beautiful in every way, and I don't regret the upgrade for a moment.

For the record, my 3dmark is now 21,599.

 

Some images here for you
http://img300.imageshack.us/img300/5750/s5000583za3.jpg

Who can guess what all the pictures are in my 'my pictures' folder
http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/875/s5000584ed5.jpg

http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/7517/s5000585vv9.jpg
http://img300.imageshack.us/my.php?image=s5000586aq8.jpg
http://img211.imageshack.us/my.php?image=s5000588bi4.jpg

 

Haha. Now I'm getting ONLY 15,000, LOL. I rememmber my 8800GTX got about 11,000. My 8800GTS 320MB got about 10,000, and my 8800GTS G92 gets about 12,500. Probably different and newer drivers vs actual speed of the cards. The 8800GTS 320MB performs exactly like a 640MB in low res. But with high res and eye candy there's no comparison.

My cards, from oldest to newest:

Intel Extreme Graphics 2 *shudder*
6600GT
X800GTO
X850XT
X1800XT 512MB(still in use in parents' PC, and still pretty usable)
7600GT(for parents, blown cap)
8800GTX
8800GTS 320MB
8800GTS G92(still in use, still pretty fast)
HD4870
HD4870 + HD4870 Crossfire(mind blowing)

So that's the progression of my cards

I'm not really with one company or another. Whoever has the fastest for my money, has my money Though you could consider me an AMD/ATi fan.

My processors, oldest to newest:

Celeron D 2.4GHz *shudder*
Sempron 3100+ Sckt 754 OC to 2.4GHz
X2 3800+ Sckt 939 OC to 2.4GHz
X2 4400+ Sckt AM2 OC to 2.6GHz
E6600 OC to 3.2GHz
X2 3800+ Sckt AM2 OC to 2.4GHz (for parents' build, super overkill for what they do)
E6750 OC to 3.4GHz(AWESOME CPU)
Q9450(bad thermistor)
Q6600 OC to 3.4GHz


So yeah, I've done a lot of upgrading in the past few years finding the perfect system for me. I think I have it finally

Oh yeah. January is my 3 year anniversary here at AD and signals my rise to Geekdom!!!

 

You're doing well, but 15k in 3dmark? Ouch, I ran the same CPU at the same speed, and with a Stock X2 I made 18 grand...

My GPUs:
8MB ATi Rage Pro IGP
64MB Sparkle Geforce 4 MX440 PCI
256MB Sapphire Radeon 9200 Atlantis AGP
256MB Sapphire Radeon X800 Pro AGP
512MB Sapphire Radeon X1900XT PCIe (now with HR-03)
256MB Sapphire Radeon X1600 Pro Low-Profile PCIe (server)
512MB Powercolor, Asus and Sapphire Radeon HD3870 PCIes (killed trying to replace cooler, still works and DOA, in that order)
512MB ATI Engineering Sample Radeon HD4870 PCIe
2048MB ATI Engineering Sample Radeon HD4870X2 PCIe

My CPUs:
Intel P3 450mhz (Mendocino? not sure) Retired
AMD Athlon XP 3000+ 2166mhz Barton SKT A Retired
AMD Athlon64 X2 4200+ 2200mhz Manchester SKT939 Sold to Greensman
Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 1800mhz Conroe2-L SKT LGA775 In fileserver
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 G0 2400mhz Kentsfield SKT LGA775 Sold to LAN party friend
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 E0 2833mhz Yorkfield SKT LGA775 In use

 

Lol

I see Me, you and Shaf in that MSN convo. That was some funny stuff.

My CPUs:
Pentium MMX
Pentium 2
Some AMD CPU
P4 1.8ghz I think
Celeron D 2.66Ghz
E6400 OCed to 3.55Ghz
E6750 OCed to 3.8 regularly(I managed 4Ghz stable on it I think)
Three Q6600s
AMD Athlon XP 3200+

Video cards:
7600GT
X1900 GT
8800GTX
7900GTX
HD3850
8800GT
HD4850

 

Oh hey. Everyone add me if you want. *E-Mail removed*

Give me a minute to run 3Dmark. I forgot 15K was with a single 4870. I haven't tested with crossfire yet ;P

EDIT: Okay much better now. 17,089 on Vista Ultimate X64

 

Yeah, certainly feels like old times, when I was 2270, and everybody else was 4500-5500 and old sam on top at a tad under 7,000. Now I'm near 5000, and everybody is 17,000 plus and sam is up there over 21,000 - YOU S.O.B.!! Hahahaha. The new build will take care of that. I revised the whole build list since that tech report article you just linked us to on the overclocking forum - nehalem is out and the chip, the 920, is "only" $230 or so, boards from Asus running about $295. Wait til my nehalem mark6 scores kick in LOL!! (It'll be like when Waymon jumped the gun on everybody and dumped a couple grand or so into hot everything and hit 20,000.)

I'm sorry to hear your 3007 lost a few pixels. The 3007 that you had was not the new -HC model which they say is 300 bright instead of your 400 bright, and 92% color accuracy or color palette versus 75% of the non-HC, and cooler colors, as you say. I think I can still pick up the older 3007 - maybe used from ebay - I have watched several auctions - or I can get last years 3007-HC, which should look like your new one, but without the extra inputs, for around $950. It seems the sellers are dropping prices trying to pick up some cash for Christmas. From your worn out pixel experience, I guess best would be to pay an extra few hundred and buy brand new.

 

It's two years old now so it's done pretty well and still works fine apart from that. Dell monitors really do seem pretty solidly made, I'll remember not to overheat my 3008 again though, that was a bit worrying seeing that!

 

So where'd you get the thing, and how great of a deal did you get?

 

3007WFP I got for £777 (Dell retail £1650, Shop retail £1500) Dec 2006
3008WFP I got for £815 (Dell retail £1300, Shop retail £1000) Nov 2008

 

So 500 for a 777 monitor? Not a bad return I guess

 

Not considering I've owned it for two years...