The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

(dont forget mine )

 

Or you can have both
The only thing my 'HDTV' lacks is SCART connectors - no great loss, that'd be the weakest quality connector on there anyway excluding perhaps composite.
I could easily hook my PC, my file server, our xbox 360, a Wii, a PS3, a TV box and a PS2 to it all at once, selectable with a mere button press. Not found a use for displayport just yet...

This does come at a price though, other than the £800 you pay for a refubished one off ebay, you also get a bit of light leakage from the bottom-right, and intense colour saturation. Fortunately the 'video' mode eliminates this issue. It is unfortunately though, only really suitable for watching video / playing consoles in this mode. For crisp images it's back to 'graphics' which means FF0000 (or bright red) is a real retina-burner.

 

My 2407WFP does have some minor light leakage. But you can't even see it unless you're on a completely black screen. The Sceptre 17" was a good monitor for me but light leakage was its main problem. Doom 3 was unplayable for me because it was so annoying. Everything that was supposed to be black was grey on the bottom and top of the screen. Now I play games like Deadspace and FEAR and the light leakage is a thin, faint strip right on the top and bottom edge. And that's extremely tolerable. I never even notice it.

So HDTV has no appeal for me. My monitor basically IS an HDTV with better image quality. And I would use something like your 30" monitor as my TV. I play all my video games and watch all my movies on it. The TV in my room is like cartoons and consoles only anyway

 

The light leakage is sort of noticeable outside a black screen, but only if you focus on the bottom right corner, the image on it has to be dark for it to show up. The spot at the top is nowhere near as bad, and can only be spotted on a genuinely black screen. The downside of this of course, is that watching a panoramic movie (for example 1920x800) leaves both areas completely black, so it shows up, especially in a dark room, but it's liveable. The upscale quality of the 2407 was nothing exceptional but on the 3008, it's genuinely HDTV-grade, I have literally got a 30" HDTV that allows 2560x1600 PC inputs on top of it all.

 

yeah but the 2407 also doesn't have to blow up the image to 30". The video is damn near native res. It has a super crisp and clear image with HD video.

 

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

 

Honestly, sit the appropriately further distance back and you'd never notice.

 

That's flawed logic. If I sit far enough back from my Zune I don't notice it has a resolution of 240x320 either.

 

Not really, since when do you watch High def films on a 30" PC monitor sitting at desk distance?

 

lol

I don't know. I never used my 30 inchers. I probably would watch it at desk distance haha.

 

I do recline in my chair when watching movies. But I'm still ~4 feet away. As far as actual image quality, your 3008 has way higher pixel density and a better quality LCD panel. But for HD video, mine would be better because the video hardly has to scale at all. This is the beginning of all the stretching and pixellation you get on big HDTVs. The pixels are HUGE on my sis's 50" and still pretty big on my friend's 42". Sorry if I'm being PC centric, but it's really all just IMO.

 

Nothing stops me putting the file in a 24" box if I need to... ;-)

 

Cheater ;P

 

dont mean to be a pain but what would be the best platfrom for gaming?(ie OS windows XP or Vista). i have been doing some reading i cant make my mind up i just been playing with vista but i dont like it that much. But what i do like i DX10, but dose that hack you can get for xp work well has anyone tested it. do you think that was the card i was using was a down fall in FPS on all of my games when running vista. the card i am use is a nvidia 8600gts XXX but upgarding to HD4850 At chrismas.

like to hear you thoughts on this

thanks

graham

 

None of the games I use look much better in Vista than XP, and the ones that do can be hacked (original Crysis for example, Warhead doesn't need hacking, it lets you run all-enthusiast in XP) - the only thing to be gained from Vista, outside bug-free Age of Conan, is dual graphics performance is improved. Without SLI or Crossfire, there's no gain to using Vista, and in fact, Vista performs around 10% slower in games due to its slower DirectX performance, so realistically XP works out the better choice. Balance it between the simpler OS, or the one with more features but lower performance. I prefer XP still, but am slowly becoming less averse to Vista (even though it is still riddled with annoying bugs)

 

i am back on XP now did a new fresh install just now still installing games and stuff lol. do you think that part of it would be that vista i to bulkie and is that it eats memory because i only have 2 gig at the moment. the other thing is that my benchmarks was lower on vista lol.

Vista i got 5762
Xp i got 7757

using 3marks06.

do you think that when windows 7 comes out in 09 well that what i have been told.that there will be a bigger improvement on the games or not. i have been testing with the pre alpha beta and i got an extra 15fps on most games. benchmarks was the same area as XP. witch i not bad. going to try the DX10 hack and see how it gose tho.

thanks for reply

graham

 

Yes, 2GB for Vista isn't really enough to run anything outside the desktop, it uses 1.4GB on its own. That said, 2GB isn't really enough to run everything in XP either, just most stuff, whereas in Vista it'll be a problem for almost everything. 4GB fortunately, is sufficient for both.

 

Yeah I'm using up 1.7Gb right now with Aero, two different media players, web browser, and three IM clients. Also some microsoft word windows open.

Of course it is using prefetch or superfetch. This way my programs load almost instantly. If I were to disable that I would save a lot more ram space.

 

For the record, I didn't experience much of a difference, certainly not one that justifies the extra 2m20 added to my boot time. (Indexing reduced it by 2m40 and malware scans off by about 30s)

 

Currently using 825MB of RAM with 57 Processes open including Firefox AND Superfetch. I dunno if it's something I'm doing wrong or what, What are you guys using to track RAM useage?

And yes. Vista is riddled with all sorts of little incompatibilities. Fortunately, most of them have a 100% work around. My only complaints so far are my Soundblaster X-Fi doesn't work at all. And my $50 Sennheiser headphones only kind of work with the integrated Realtek HD. I can get the sound test to work in them but it doesn't deactivate my speakers and switch to headphone output. I've still got a virgin install of XP on my other partition so I'm ready to drop Vista at a moments notice if it ticks me off

And as far as dual graphics. As far as I've tested and seen, the differences are extremely minor. I get roughly the same performance with only a few games showing any performance gains. Nothing to write home about.