The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

HAHA

Man you guys are soooooo into CoD4 it's amazing

Strategies and what not

I shoot everything that moves with the most powerful gun I can lay my hands on

And it's still a load of fun ;D

 

I tend to have a more casual stance on the game than Rich and Shaffaaf, but nonetheless it's an enjoyable title, certainly.

 

So your more like me
You play for fun

I really love it, if only I had DSL for online play, I only played multiplayer on LAN

Yet to try WaW, even though it's installed on my system

 

Whoops, a mod showed up. Pay attention Shaff Hahahaha!

Yeah Ray, Shaffaaf and I are COD4 online junkies, hahahaha. I'm afraid to go back to Counter-Strike because it was the same - hours after hours. You're probably lucky not to have DSL. It takes me 4 hours to get the rust off, 4-6 hours of good play time, then fatigue sets in and 6 more hours of getting my ass handed to me MUHAHAHAHAHAHA! I'm trying to control it - just Wednesdays. But when you say, Ray, shoot everything that moves with the most powerful gun - WHICH GUN IS THAT? Hahahaha. I'm sure Shaff and I have many ideas about the value of various gun options, hehe. (For example, do you want to hang back and snipe - or sort of partly hang back and use light machine gun with grip, or do you prefer to get in and mix it up.) I seem to suck at sniping, although I try it occasionally when I pick up a dropped sniper rifle - but I don't generally have the patience for sniping. For a while I liked the helicopters I was getting with laid back light machine gun action, but more lately I just want to jump in and "do the dance" hahahahaha. I wonder what is shaff's preference, and if we should hook up on the same server one day Lol.

You see, that's what I mean, Sam. You can sit back at about twice the distance away from the screen as I am. You don't have to place your keyboard actually up on top of the screen legs like I do hahaha. But I make up for screen smallness by sitting closer! Lol.

Yeah, Sam, my brain has finally opened up and sliding a new motherboard into that case now seems very logical to me. (I think it was the new little 19" dell - the display is SOOO beautiful that it has transported me to that dimension you guys have occupied for a long time - the twilight zone - no, the dimension of enchanced appreciation for what estuansis calls "the ambiance.") LOL I was right the first time, the twilight zone, hehe.

I had spec'd out a $64 gigabyte, but for $15 more, the gigabyte you mentioned offers a LOT MORE: second bios chip for easy recovery, faster fsb, accepts faster memory, power conservation, (that's why YOU love it - right Sam hehe) up to 8 gig memory not 4, if I end up dual-booting shaff's beloved Vista - I have downloaded it already - plus PCI-E 2.0, etc. etc. For memory I came up with 4 gigs of DDR2 Corsair for $25 after $30 rebate - it's DDR800, and the EP43-DS3L you recommend will take overclocked up to ddr1200, standard 1066, but - #1 of course the slower memory will run okay, right even though the board standard is 1066? - or am I wrong about that? and #2, if 800 is okay versus 1066, will it really make much of a difference?

Anyway, I added that board just now to my wish list. In a few weeks I'll get very specific on components. But I see you mentioned a quad 6600, whereas I was thinking E8400 wolfdale. Oh - I see, it's a requirement for GTA4! Since I'd be getting a quad, I'd be set up perfectly for crossfire, employing shaff's rule, cf=quad, single gfx=core 2 duo.

So, still keeping the budget under control, unlike last time, should I spend a bit more and get a crossfire board, just in case I later decide to add a second HD4850 (I realize I might have to swap out psu also if I did that.) This whole thing is just an interim solution, until the nehalem new build, but that WOULD give me added expansion potential. If you like my expansion potential logic, which crossfire 8 gig board would you suggest and how much more than $79 would it be?

And one more thing: (whoops, I seem to be getting kind of specific right now - can't help myself lol) for overclocking the quad, the better hsf require a mounting bracket on the back of the mobo, so if I am going to want to improve on stock cooling I might as well do it all at once rather than remove the mobo later. My case width limits me to about a 5" cooler, so tuniq is out, coolmaster that boozer likes is out - zalman has one for about $50. Correct that - right now about $41 ZALMAN CNPS9500, or I just came across an even shorter 4.2" ARCTIC COOLING Freezer 7 Pro 92mm CPU Cooler which was buried on my huge component wishlist - maybe that's the one boozer recommended - which right now is only $19 with 6 heat pipes - how could I go wrong for under $20. What do you think?

Lastly - don't get me wrong about the PS3. I have zero interest in console gaming - even at HD 1080p. Your jpgs clearly show - there is no comparison versus PC!

But the home theater is for a relative where we hang out sometimes and watch movies - on a laptop!! So if I gifted them that way, Frank and Vanessa and Danny would be in heaven, and maybe Miles (the Valve animator guy) would come over with his family, and the bonus would be that maybe we'd all hang out more - and I would certainly enjoy the blue ray HD movies on a big screen wayyy more than on the laptop. I'd throw in the PS3 as a $350 afterthought, just for Frank, who loved the original half life. He might even tinker around with a few PS3 titles - like COD4. And Valve has in fact ported over all their stuff to consoles. But in any case, we'd still have the blue ray player and I would only have invested $200 more versus buying a standard blue ray - well add another $20 for a proper blue ray remote instead of the gaming remote, as the Crutchfield rep reminded me.

Rich

 

Having broken my install, I need to find a 'real' version of the game if you know what I mean to carry on, but when I was playing, the US servers that shaffaaf played on made sniping difficult for me due to their high connection latency. It wasn't so much a problem at home due to our fast internet connection there, but in York, our relatively mediocre phone line makes a bad situation worse. For spraying the MPs and MGs, lag is of no real consequence, but for sniping, it can be difficult.

Dual booting XP and Vista is certainly the way to go, as much as people bash Vista, and as much as Vista "fans" stick hard and fast to their OS of choice, the fact is, you can't really live without either. Given the rather surprising result that Far Cry 2 runs noticeably faster in DX10 than DX9, perhaps that will help add to its credibility (mind you, enabling DX10 removes the game's ability to render some of the grass, so take or leave, the graphics of everything else are also improved, however, if subtly)

I can say now with absolute certainty that for games, there was no difference for me in using 800mhz and 1066mhz RAM speed, and even now in fact due to the limited memory multipliers on my board, I can only run at 860mhz without having to overclock my RAM, which I see no reason to mess around with.

The board I think you should buy Rich, is the EP45-UD3P - the right chipset to overclock quads, enough power regulation to do it and last, two PCIe slots to run crossfire in the future, but a relatively low price tag. For a CPU cooler, overclocking a quad isn't going to be easy on something like a Freezer 7 Pro, you can do it, but only without making much of an adjustment to the voltages. The CNPS9500 is much bigger, noisier and more expensive than the Freezer 7 Pro, and loses out by a couple of degrees in cooling performance, so the Arctic is hands down the winner of the pair, but compared to coolers like the Ultra-120 and Tuniq Tower, neither are top dog.

Oh by the way, pass my congrats to Miles on the animations for Left 4 Dead, they're very impressive.

 

Hey I just saw the Xbox vs PC comparison of GTA4, and can I say... They both look horrible.

 

Neither look great, it has to be said, but the game looks reasonable at max settings, provided you can get there - it takes clever hacks of the game, or a 2GB single GPU... oh wait.

 

Thanks Sam - that EP45-UD3P board after $20 rebate is only $36 more than the other - it's on the wishlist now. Looks like a beauty! Both slots are PCI-E 2.0, one at 16x, the other at 8x - still 2.0 is twice 1.1 so blazing fast.

So was I correct? - you CAN always run slower memory than spec'd for the board, and DDR800 is quite acceptable, even though this board has 1600 fsb, and likes 1333 memory? For 8 gigs of memory, do I just double up the $25 (after $30 rebate) Corsair DDR800 2x2gb, Item #:N82E16820145184 - the board has 4 memory slots - or do you suggest something else? (Oh sh*t, the board goes all the way to 16 gigs - wow!)

Regarding the cooler, I'm hearing you say it's the Arctic if I can't find anything else, but do you guys know of a 130mm or smaller cooler (both the ultra and the tuniq, which I would prefer, are over 150mm in height) that beats the Arctic?

Wait a second, let's think about this for a bit. My case is only 173 mm wide, so the ultra at 160 leaves me 13 mm or .5" for the distance from the case to the top of the quad chip - and that's by losing the intake fan! The tuniq at 153 mm gives me a tiny bit 1/4" more room, 20 mm in all, about .8". Sam what would you say is the distance on a mid tower from the side of the case, to the top of the mobo, and then add to that the thickness of the quad chip - just a "best guess." More than 20mm? If the math worked out where I could add the Tuniq, I would be willing to mount the side intake fan on the outside of the case - I think I could make it work and not look too ugly and weird. So the only question is, does 20mm more than cover the distance from outside of case to top of quad chip?

One last thing - I was reading one time that Sata controllers on some mobos didn't have fixed clocks, and ran off the fsb, so overclockers experienced loss of sata controller when fiddling with fsb frequencies. Is that a non-issue on a board like the EP45-UD3P?

Yes, for sure I'll pass on your congratulations to Miles. Thank you for that.

Rich

 

As it happens Thermalright make a smaller cooler, the Ultima-90, but I don't know how much better than the Freezer 7 it is, if any. I suspect it may prove useful for lower noise, but overall cooling may not be much different. Using four sticks of RAM is all well and good, but it will hurt your overclock severely. More to the point though, it's dirt cheap to get 4GB in just two sticks, and I certainly can't find a reason to use any more than that yet.

I have never experienced loss of S-ATA control ever, when overclocked. Not on my A8N-SLI (200->218), P5N-E SLI (200->334), P35C-DS3R (200->350) or on my current board (up to its limit of 455FSB inclusive) - I suspect it's probably one of the many issues that plague nforce boards, the S-ATA controllers on those are notoriously unreliable and usually give out altogether after a year if that.

I'm not sure on the exact dimensions (and don't have the time now to look them up) but the Ultra-120A (same height as the Extreme) fits in my NZXT Lexa with a good few mms to spare, as the side case fan is low down enough not to interfere, it wouldn't fit otherwise. On that basis, look up the width of the cooler you intend to use, and the width of my case - it does not use extra space for cable management, or an unusually thick wall, so you should be able to compare the measurements exactly.
The thickness of a Core 2 CPU is pretty small, I'd probably say <5mm. Discount this and work off my comparative measurements - hint, in most normal PC cases without obstructive side fans, the Ultra-120 coolers fit.

 

Well, GTA4 performance is about as I expected. Using similar settings as Sam at 1920, making changes for video memory limitations. Making 30-35 running around and 20-25 driving and in heavy scenes.

I'll have to add, poor performance or no, the game is still quite playable. I am able to enjoy the gameplay, and the graphics are quite passable for a GTA game.

Poor performance is to be expected. Even in GTA: SA I get frame drops and inconsistent performance. Oh well, I'll wait for my friend to get the 360 version and make a comparison.

 

Every gta was taxing.... the tuniq tower can fan fit in my akasa zen, you can get less standard midi cases if you tried lol!

 

No Sam, the memory I was talking about is 4 gigs
corsair 2 sticks = 4 gigs DDR800 for $25 after rebate!

So I was asking about getting two sets = 4 sticks = 8 gigs (I was thinking about the eventual Vista boot on the dual boot system.) Does that sound good to you - 8 gigs of DDR800 for only $50! Is that what I should do?

FINALLY SOME CASE PICS:

Here is my much beloved case - don't laugh all you guys - it's a customized mini-tempest:



I have blood on my hands literally from these modifications - especially the top exhaust fan mod which was hell creating the hole. This is not some cut-it-like butter aluminum Lian-Li like Shaff's Buckingham Palace, this is some kind of a tempered bitch steel - quite HARD steel material that hacksaw blades have a VERY difficult time with - I ended up with HOURS of painful drilling (almost makes me want to run out and get lian-li for the next case lol):



THAT'S WHY THIS CASE DESERVES A LAST HURRAH - A $500 FINAL UPGRADE lol.

Sam, back to our cpu cooler discussion, you said you had a few mm left over. Ummmm - how many mms EXACTLY? I am in big trouble!!

One helpful thought - your case at 8.66 inches, or about 220mm, has a thicker glass side panel, which I would guess is at least 10mm thick, 1/3 inch??, (well maybe only 1/4" or 7 mm) whereas my steel side cover is of course very thin, I'm going to assume 1mm thick.

My case is just about 175mm thick, at least 45mm less than yours. Going by the assumption that your glass thickness saves me 9 mm, the ultima 90 is 21mm shorter than your ultima extreme, so I have saved 30mm all together. But I'm 45 mm narrower. So do you have 15mm of a gap, over 1/2 inch?

If your answer is, "No, Rich, much less than 1/2 inch" then I'm screwed. So then, I might have no choice but to use the Zalman, or Arctic Freezer Pro - or..... mod my case a little more. See more about that with picture at the bottom.

The zalman and Arctic are both at 127 mm, saving me 12 more mm, total savings 42, only 3mm shy of the difference in width of your case and mine. Surely you have at least a 3mm gap, 1/8 inch? I'm making a lot of assumptions - maybe your glass is much narrower than 10mm. But I think either the zalman or actic would fit.

But I really like the Ultima 90.

But it looks like it won't fit in my case, whereas the zalman or arctic, 1/2" shorter, might just make it.

I am really impressed that the Ultima 90 has 6 fully looping pipes - meaning there are actually 12 risers coming off the top of the cpu, as compared to the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro pictured down below, with 3 heatpipes and only 6 risers. My gut tells me it's the number of risers - with double the flash evaporation points on the cpu - that would allow removal of a lot more heat.

Anandtech on their bench from Aug 2007 show the 92mm fan performing as well as the 120mm fan, and the ultima 90 beating the zalman by 4 degrees C under load and coming within 1 degree C of the tuniq, and 2-3 degrees of the full-size Ultra and Ultra Extreme. You can add a second fan to the ultima on the other side, but it doesn't look like that makes a difference - however on drastic overclocking it very well might help - you have to move a lot of heat away from the cpu!

In the same article, the overclocking max stable results show that point precisely - here the 120mm fan wins at 3.90, versus 3.87 for the 92mm fan - so I would think a fan on either side in a push-pull would maybe help even more so.

But the Arctic Freezer 7 Pro wasn't on last year's bench, so I pulled up a more recent Anandtech bench from Jan of 2008. In this bench they changed their testing:

In the newer test the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro beat the Ultra Extreme by one degree - but that was running the cpu at standard load without the extra heat dissipation requirements of overclocking.




WITHOUT OVERCLOCKING: Here's a newegg Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro quote from a guy running the same chip 6600, and the same mobo you have recommended for me

BUT WITH OVERCLOCKING: When you look at the overclocking segment, the expected winners emerged being the ultra extreme and tuniq etc. The Arctic Freezer 7 Pro slightly edged out the zalman, maintaining a clock at 3850 compared to the top speeds of 3960 Monsoon, 3940 Ultra, and 3900 Ultima-90, and intel hsf top of 3730.

They must have been using a 120mm fan on the ultima-90, because their earlier max stable showed 3.87 with 92mm fan. I might have to use a 92mm fan for height reasons - but I can pair them up in push-pull, so I bet I could achieve the 3.90 in their test bed.

As the anandtech max stable overclocking graphs show, Sam, you're right. For overclocking, you have to move a lot of heat. And Anandtech was using a dual core - the sheer amount of heat the 6600 throws off would overcome the Arctic and the Zalman at lower stable clocks. But how significant is that for my gaming?

The results on the 6600 will be different than anandtech got, but going back to their bench, we see 3.73 for the stock intel hsf, then 3.85 Mhz for the Arctic, then 3.90 Mhz for the Ultima-90, then 3.94 for the ultima extreme.

So, versus free stock hsf, if the Arctic for $18 gets me from 3.73 to 3.85, and something similar to that for the 6600, then great! But to get from 3.85 with the Arctic, to 3.90 with the Ultima-90, at $30 more, and cut out my side panel a bit, do I gain that much in your opinion??

However, once again, I know the 6600 throws out a LOT MORE HEAT than the dual core anandtech was using. So I am very willing to do the side panel modification if you think the difference, and quality of the cooler, are worth it.

Plus as I pointed out above, by adding two fans in a push pull, the cooler might perform even better in heat removal and come closer to your extreme. I like the way the Ultima mounts using a back plate - it's not going to fall out on me - and I get to add my own quality fan or fans - I don't like that they mention that the fan on the Freezer 7 Pro is not even as good as on the cheaper Alpine for some reason.

If I were to mod my case to make the ultima-90 work, here's how I would do it:

I believe I'm within about 1/4" of making it work. So I think I can engineer a 140 mm fan block, with no fan, on the outside of my case, remove the fan like I said, allow the top of the ultima-90 to protrude out of the case within the fan block, and then cover the block with a snap-on filter, and the whole thing won't really look all that bad. Here's a picture of my plan:




So, ultimately, what do you think, Sam?

To summarize, I believe I can make the better cooler work with some careful panel modification that won't be anywhere nearly as painful as what I've already been through with this case, and I really do like that Ultima-90. (fanboy already lol)

Rich

 

Sorry for the late reply, my email notifications haven't been working since yesterday.
As I mentioned before, if you use 4 sticks, regardless of what size they are, that'll stunt your overclocking performance - dunno if you care about overclocking, but given the time and effort you spent modifying that case (nice professional job by the way, I like it, but not too sure on the spider's web pattern on the lower vent!), it wouldn't surprise me if eventually you do care, since the Core 2, overclocking has hardly given only subtle gains to performance. I can tell you now, hog as it is, I haven't got Vista to break 4GB of RAM yet.
The panel (not glass lol, it's plastic, hence why my case only weighs 12.8lb empty) is approximately 2-3mm thick at the most. I would be highly surprised if your case could not even fit an Ultima-90 since it is still a normal form factor case. Staring closely at the end of the heatpipes on my Ultra-120, I would guess at having around 12-20mm of free space, probably closer to around 16-18. I am shocked that your case is 45mm narrower, but looking closely at my front 5.25" bay setup, there is a lot of extra space around the outside. From the various roundings of reviews, the Ultima-90 is 21-23mm lower than the Ultra-120A, so having 45mm less space to work with is going to be tricky. As I said before, I don't think you're saving more than a couple of mm by not having the window there, so really, I think you're probably going to be looking at having 39-42mm extra space, not 45. In any case, if the Arctic is so much as 5mm shorter than the Ultima it should fit no problem, and I have to say, I literally assume the Freeer 7 Pro will fit in any normal case, and as yet haven't been proven wrong.

The Anandtech benchmark is famous at afterdawn because it's false, so I'd look elsewhere for cooling tests. The Freezer 7 Pro beating the Ultra-120 Extreme is only possible if the Ultra-120 had no fan attached. It is this very benchmark that veered me away from Anandtech - I wonder how much they got paid to get that one wrong.
I'll give you my experience, I got CPU temps of 47ºC full load on my E4300 when it was overclocked to 3.15Ghz, 1.425V. All well and good, if you fancy a ear blasting. At the highest bearable fan speed for me, 70%, I got aroud 56C load, but bear in mind this was the minimum speed required to keep the P5N-E SLI northbridge cool at 75ºC. If you lowered the fan speed on the CPU any further, the CPU would only reach about 60, which overclocked to such a level would not be an issue, but the chipset on the board I had at the time would exceed 80 celsius and cause the PC to crash. Power consumption tests of the nForce 6 boards put the power usage of said chipsets about the same as Core 2 Duo CPUs, higher for the 680i at 67W versus 60-65, and how many times bigger is the CPU heatsink? Not to mention only the CPU's heatsink has a fan. The X38's comparatively high 50W power consumption is peanuts compared to the nforce.


Long story short Rich, you MIGHT be able to fit an Ultima-90, you WILL be able to fit a Freeer 7 Pro, but to push big numbers, you will need a 120mm cooler, and to have one of those, you will need a case that has been designed for them.

 

My akasa zen which is 200mm wide can fit the tuniq tower. How about the noctua nh-u9b?

 

Thanks Sam, I'm glad you like what I did with the case. In retrospect, for $100, I should have just gone right out and bought a Lexa, but, you know, part of having a hobby and putting in ridiculous time is the learning curve and the hands-on "craftsmanship" including the goofy filter design - LOL - I noticed that too after I bought the little snapon - well I have always liked the Spider Man series, hahahaha.

That's very interesting - I remember you had mentioned that you rely more on TechReport and less on Anandtech these days. So I actually found the VERY bench that got you po'd at Anandtech - wow! - what a coincidence! I had a hard time swallowing that one too - an extra degree lower, under load, than the Ultra 120 extreme, for the lowly Freezer 7 Pro, hahahaha. I looked and laughed! The same thought crossed my mind - what did they pay the bastard! (Of course that was for standard clocks only, no overclocking.)

Back to the Tuniq or Ultra, there is NO way I would be able to get either of those in my case, without a case mod that would look like a big tumor sticking out the side LOL. For $2 I can change out the spidey design, but a big case tumor would be slightly uglier than even I could tolerate hahahaha. But if I can squeeze the very pretty ultima-90 in there, I'll put two fans on it in push-pull and that should help move the heat out. It still has the same 12 risers of your extreme which impresses me greatly.

If I have to RMA it back and slip a Freezer Pro in, oh well, I tried. The BIG numbers will have to wait for the tempest and the new nehalem build, and the 5000 series ATI. Sure, I could get the tempest right now, but I just have a soft spot for this case, so I'll ride it out one more final upgrade. And I won't be getting your 2560x1600 until the new build, so I don't have so many pixels to push around even if I pick up a 1920x1200.

Shaff, your 200mm will fit the tuniq - but how many mms are left over - how much of a gap do you have - or is it actually touching the side of your case? My case is only 175, so I'm 25mm short of you - but the ultima-90 saves me 21 mm - no I take that back, the tuniq is 153, so the ultima only saves me 14mm. So if you have a 9mm gap (3/8") I might be able to make it with the ultima-90 without the extra mod. (The freezer is 12mm shorter, and yes, for sure will fit. But I'd really like to get those 12 ultima risers working for me. By the way, dude, did you ever get my PM about cod4?)

So soon, with whatever cooler, I'll be looking to tap into everybody's overclocking tips. Meanwhile I am reading the tweak guide.

Oh Sam, I almost forgot, so - no point going past 2 sticks = 4 gigs is what you said. Okay, in that case, do you like the cheap Corsair at $55 less $30 rebate, or should I spring for the dominators like you picked up?

Rich

 

hi is anyone playing call of duty world at war cracked or not here i would like to join if you wouldnt mind. Same gose with 4.

thanks

navskin

PS or GRID

 

btw rich, love your case, but bow down to the palace:

(booted into 3.4GHz to start with, as i had had my E2140 at 400FSB)











temps:


CPU: 10C
Core0:27
Core1:31
Core2:40
Core3:41

my fav shot

 

Looking nice

I want that camera really bad now >.<

I have to show off the Crossfire config. It's just too epically cool not to photograph.

 

Kind of funny really, my friend at fragsoc (not Spamual, someone else) has just had a similar upgrade, though he hasn't actually enabled crossfire yet, since he's messing with alternative coolers. Two 4870s, an X38-DS5, an HX 520W and a Q6600...

 

Damn it basically IS mine. I guess great minds think alike