The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Yeah, I have to choose from between the diamondback and mx518, beacuse they have both recieved good reviews, and are well known.

Also, I can get them for a decent price here.

I haven't been able to go out and hold them both yet, once I do, I will choose whichever is more comfy.

@estuansis
I'll also keep an eye out for the krait, I love its orange color, also I've heard it's a little cheaper than the diamondback.

 

The Krait is a promising mouse, and cheap too, I've recommended it to a few people. I just like the option of having side buttons, which the Krait does not have. Though the writing has completely worn away, my Diamondback is so far so good at 2 1/2 years, it's just unfortunate Razer never fixed the bug with their mice in that sometimes it won't recognise, so you unplug and replug it. Their solution on the Copperhead was merely to add a button on the underneath to do this automatically! While that might seem very poor for what is quite an expensive brand, I prefer Razer to Logitech as the drivers do not automatically uninstall those of any rival brands, like Microsoft's and Logitech's do. (Yes, Logitech Keyboard + Microsoft Mouse or vice versa means one of them has to remain driverless, I never found a workaround for this)

 

I love the color too. It doesn't match any of my blue system lighting or my blue Saitek Eclipse, but I don't care The lighting in the mouse is quite nice and looks cool. And yes it's also cheaper. It's an optical mouse vs a laser one though, but I can't tell the difference.

It was exactly what I wanted. I didn't want the side buttons, just a solid 3 button mouse. The rubber grips on the side are a nice change from the ergonomically designed form-fitting mice like the Mx518. They give you better control over the mouse, IMO. The writing still looks brand new on mine. Probably due to how I hold it. The sticker on the bottom is long gone though. I've never had any bugs or problems with it as long as I've used it. Mine is also 2 1/2 years old and going strong. Funny enough, I never did install the drivers again after I put the disk away. The default 1600dpi setting is perfect for everything as-is.

 

Likewise for me actually.

 

Well, I don't think I'll need the extra buttons, but I don't MIND having them

I'll look around hopefully next weekend

@sam On my old desktop, I had (and still do) a logitech keyboard with its software and a microsoft mouse with its software (intellipoint I believe), and they both worked fine

Not sure why they might not

 

btw the habu uses razer FW and drivers, as inside its a diamondback, but out side the ergonomics of MS

honestly, cant praise it enough

oh yeah and trust me once you haev the side buttons you cant go back gaming.

for cod4:

left click = shoot
right click = zoom
scroll up/down = change weapon
scroll click = knife
side button 1 = special grenade
side button 2 = grenade

this way my WASD hand hardly moves, only a little to reload or crouch/prone, or check the map

 

Presumably depends on the software used then, Quickset and Intellipoint were the two that would not get on.
As it happens, I tend to use the keyboard more than the mouse side buttons, but maybe that's something I will have to change if I want to improve at COD4....

 

hehe it makes thigns much easier as for nades and stuff you not pressing the worng key by accident and changing weapon seems UT esp with the mouse wheel

also the V for the knife is very annoying, yes sometimes i end up changing weapon after i knife by accident lol, but atleast i dont have to move my index far from the D or accidently press the spacebar instead of the V with my thumb

this last week i have been raping cod4, check out the screenies, i reinstalled, and my case/manual is back in york, so i used cracked servers, and in scrims and utdm vs utdm, i have been raperageing , jsut as i though id move onto cod5 aswell loll!!

 

me likes the gtx295, bar on avg it being about £60+ more than the 4870x2.

then again, you will save on leccy, but then, who cares about leccy spending that muchon a card

if the x2 is £330, then the gtx 295 needs to be £350.

 

In other news, the Phenom IIs are looking promising. Several sites are reporting 3.7GHz on air with stock cooling. I know what I'm converting to

 

yet clock for clock, not as good as the yorkfeilds..... a year later and still playing catch up.... well done amd (!)

 

The GTX295 is as marginally superior to the HD4870X2 as the GTX260 216 is to the HD4870 1GB really, in short, not enough to justify any extra cost. Right now, the extra cost is considerable, £80 at present between cheapest for each, and £60 between like brands. Right now, it's basically an nvidia 4870X2 rival, it is not better or more advanced in any way, other than with current drivers, being completely unable to use Anti-Aliasing at 2560x1600 (which for a card this powerful, completely defeats its purpose). I hope they get that fixed sharpish.

Estuansis: It's promising, but consider they start at 3Ghz already. The Core 2 Quad that starts at that speed is the Q9650, and that gets a damn sight further than 3.7Ghz easily enough. In AMD's defense, getting beyond 3.5Ghz on a stock cooler is no longer really possible for Intel since they basically removed all the heatsink from their heatsinks, and left you with the copper base and the fan on top... :S
In Intel's defense, the 3.7Ghz Phenom II is only equal to a 3.3Ghz Core 2 Quad, and 3.3Ghz can be got at stock voltage on even a C1 Q9450, let alone anything superior. On top of this, the Q9450 (OEM at least) is a full £35 cheaper than the Phenom II 940 in the UK, and the motherboard required to get the Phenom II to 3.7 and beyond costs £125, versus the £60 you could spend to get any old board that would easily run a Core 2 Quad at the same speed if not further.

AMD's best is much better, but still not quite good (or more specifically, cheap) enough.

 

If and when prices fall I want to convert back to AMD on my main build. They are fast enough for me and I want to support my favorite brand name

I bet I could almost hit 4GHz on the Tuniq Tower considering the power of an AMD stock cooler. That must be reasonable or at least possible with a good chip. All told, I would even be happy with 3.4GHz. I game at a fairly high resolution, so I doubt I would have any noticeable bottlenecking with a 3.4GHz Phenom II.

Call it fanboyism if you want but I like AMD.

 

The voltage required to break the 3.8 barrier is astronomical. 1.25-1.30gets you 3.6, they couldn't get 4Ghz stable at 1.5V. Also, AMD stock coolers are far better than Intel stock coolers - good thing, the AMD CPUs use much more power!
The only game the AMDs are likely to bottleneck is Crysis, as your 3.7Ghz Q6600 is about as fast as a 4Ghz Phenom II, maybe slightly faster, so your performance in the game may be slightly behind.

 

Just thought I'd post

Finished crysis on wednesday, great game

Am now playing Far CRY 2

Really happy with games performance
I play it with overall settings on high, at 1280x800 at a playable framerate of 26+

Really good, considering that crysis at the same res. only runs well on medium, even though the jungles beat the outback anyday

The effects on high are nice.
I can also run it at very high, but at time it gets choppy

I'll post benchies using the in-built tool if anyone is interested

 

stock intel cooler easily gets the i920 to atleast 3.8

 

The i7 cooler has obviously changed then. I was referring to the Yorkfield stock cooler, which to be fair, is the Phenom II's comparison.

 

Wow I've been gone for 10 days!! Lots of holiday family stuff and helping Vanessa move. (Vanessa is the sister of Miles - Valve animator - all the Left4Dead animation.)

Another long post for Ray to complain about, damn him! Hahahaha!

Hahahaha! Thanks Ray - I try. I'm glad you liked that PTA bit. Poor thing, the GTA4 microstuttering was just soooo frustrating - my favorite part is where she talks about flattening the two pedestrians. Hahahaha. (Yeah, she's a gangsta')

But in Karen's comments back to me, I picked up on that she maybe took a very slight exception to the PTA bit - the link she gave me showed I was being an ignorant chauvinist about the PTA moms - lots of interesting statistics:

Those are friggin' amazing statistics LOL. Everybody's gaming!!! (Miles will always have job security lol!)

Yeah, Dave Chapelle is the bomb - so you've seen those episodes. I didn't start picking up on him until I caught his DVDs - he was already off to South Africa - hey that's where you are - did you see him? LOL

Speaking about "hilarious", that chapelle skit with the kid who says: "He's hilarious!" is one of my all time favorites. On the director's commentary, Dave and his writing partner are talking, and they said they auditioned a bunch of kids, and they ended up hiring THAT particular kid, just because of how he said THAT particular word - missing teeth and all. Pretty good skit!

I think Chapelle just became overcome by all the pressure. He said - I think it was on Oprah - he was doing a skit with himself in black face, like the old minstrel singers, and one crew member, maybe one of the camermen, was laughing so hard - that for the first time he got the feeling he was being laughed at, rather than laughed with.

Well, I have to say, that Dave in black face IS kind of excruciatingly funny, if you think about it. The humor is SO ironic - I would have been standing there just dying too and having a hard time with the camera. For him to start getting those kinds of paranoid ideas just tells me he was under too much pressure.

No question Chapelle is absolutely a top rate comic genius of all time - probably ranks right up there with Charlie Chaplin - what do you limies say about that, Sam, Shaff, Boozer? And his writing partner, the white guy, is exceptional too - from the director's commentary it appeared that he wrote most of the skit about "Is Wayne Brady gonna have to choke a bitch?" Hahahaha. Another killer skit.

I'll always be a fan of Chapelle's - it will be fun to see him come back with some new series, or some movies. Russell Peters - the name sounds familiar but I can't say I know who he is. But now that you mention him, I'll keep an eye out. Is it the kind of rascism that chapelle uses - kind of reverse rascism - or is it mean-spirited rascism? (Which would be kind of not in keeping with the times - the Obama times!!) HISTORIC TIMES!!! CONGRATULATIONS AMERICA FOR MAKING A BIG LEAP OVER THE RACIAL DIVIDE!!!

Estuansis, you like the graphics of COD5 - fantastic - it just came in the mail from ebay.

But HALF the fps of COD4 - oh no! - I'm in big fat trouble!

Well, thank god I came to my senses and I'll be ditching the P4 and picking up that sweet "2 oz of extra copper" Gigabyte cf GA-EP45-UD3P mobo that Sam told me to get ($116 after rebate at newegg) and the Q6600.

Hey all, Sam, will it make any difference really if I get the 4 gig Corsair two stick ram ddr2 800 for $25 after $30 rebate, or is it important for ultimate Q6600 overclocking to get the Corsair Dominator 4 gigs ddr2 1066 with fan for $69 after $40 rebate? I will be held back somewhat in my max stable overclock because of needing to use the Freezer 7 Pro for space limitations - (I would love to be able to use the Tuniq and get 3.7 like estuansis) - so is the cheaper ram just as good or should I spend the extra $45?

Nice review Theft. Yeah, sure. I want to go find you and contribute to your 5 to 1 mofo kill ratio, hahahaha. You and shaff. Hey shaff, you've met your match!!

But seriously, speaking of ps3, that's why I've been gone for 10 days. I just bought a little home theater system for Vanessa as a house warming present, and it included a blue ray, but it's not all completely hooked up yet - I just ordered an optical to coax digital converter for example so I can feed the sound out from the 24" Samsung HD monitor to the Philips little 5.1 hts ($200 at costco!!) Anyway, the blue ray is not yet hooked up although Vanessa's boyfriend tried to make it work, but when I go back up there to LA maybe next week I think I'll take the blue ray back to costco and swap for the PS3 if they let me, and they have a bundle with an extra remote and COD5 for $499.

So Theft, if I get the PS3 going, I'll be sure to look up PigHeadedBeast - instead of all that dog food you've been eating, you might as well dine on me! Hahahaha!

Seriously though, for the extra couple hundred, it makes more sense to get the whole ps3 gaming system, wifi internet browsing, 80 gig expandable drive, etc. right? Since you have one, Theft, you'd probably agree.

Yeah, Shaff, I got xfire. But I am getting completely massacred on the creek map, and also on Chinatown, and I don't have my rhythm back, so until I am at least 1 to 1 or better I don't want to play against you or Theft or anybody else who is going to humiliate me even worse than I am now, hahahaha! I am not playing regularly, and I get rusty really fast!

Also part of the problem is that I'm getting micro-stuttering - I don't know if punkbuster is acting up - also I am getting kicked from time to time. I googled and followed some of their suggestions - but I think the real cure is the hardware upgrade - I'll be able to run the little punkbuster stuff easily with that quad and I won't know it's there.

Booze are you still on the holiday sauce? Yeah COD2 kicked major ass, but COD4 - look at Estuansis' 9.5 ranking - maybe best of all time!!!!

Nice mouse discussion guys. I took note - I'll come back to it. I never bought a good gaming mouse, but after the $600 upgrade I might as well get a decent mouse. Maybe the steelseries - what do you think about that one shaff? I copied the entirety of shaff's post about the side buttons - I've seen his high scoring - like TheftAuto - on his xfire profile lol. The idea of not hardly ever needing to move off the WASD makes a lot of sense. You and me both, Sam - if we're gonna get better on COD4 we'll have to use the side buttons.

Ray, you're cruising along on those Crysis games. You like the jungle better than the outback? You're right there in SA while we here are just imagining what it's like. Have you been to those types of terrains - is it realistic?

I'm with you, estuansis, I'd like to see AMD surge forward. Looks like Sam's got some strong arguments that they aren't quite there yet. Isn't there a Phenom 3 coming pretty soon? By the way, what about those results from the last two pages of the greek translated review that Russ referenced in the builder thread, where the phenom got beat at 1280x1024 in crysis, but at the higher 1680x1050 the phenoms, both of them, wiped out even the best and most expensive i7 processor. Russ said they had tuned the phenom for certain popular resolutions and he thought that their tuned range would include 1920x1200. What have you heard about that, Sam, or estuansis? Estuansis, if you didn't see that article, I'll find the link again for you.

Rich

 

Good to hear from ya rich

I needed my *rich's long posts* fix

You my friend are mistaken
When I say SA, I mean Saudi Arabia, as in middle of the desert in the middle east. Not South Africa, so I have no idea what the outback looks like

Looking forward to playing Warhead soon

 

I thought Australia was the outback, not South Africa.