The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Hah likewise, even with four GPUs, I get about 25fps or so at all Enthusiast with no AA at 2560x1600. The main problem is the CPU/memory lag though.

 

Catalyst 9.2 is out. Hit their website for the download.

 

Thanks for the notification - just in time for a LAN.
<crosses fingers that it fixes the CTDs>

 

Duly noted. They've helped Crossfire performance in a few games as of late. Especially 8.9 was good. I'd still like to see better scaling with CoD5 because Treyarch messed something up with the engine. It doesn't perform anywhere near CoD4.

 

So I got a PC for free and it has a E1400(dual core Allendale core with half the cache at 2Ghz). I'm thinking either doing a pinmod or some kind or maybe using clockgen or setfsb to overclock it a bit and buying a cheap video card to have a halfway decent machine to play games on again.

 

Haven't been on in a while
I see you back boozer

Nice one
Yeah, you could probably get a 4850/9600GSO for cheap


I thought I'd share some of my own stories with you guys

I was playing C0D4 a while back ,and i usually have HWMonitor running to monitor my temps
I just checked it randomly while respawning, and the history showed TZS0/1 to have hot 100 degrees C and CPU/GPU in high-eighties/90s :0

I freaked man
I mean the temps of the GPU have hit the 90s at times, but CPU stays below 80
These temps are high but below the thermal limit of the parts, but 100 isn't

After some reseaching and posting I was told to open her up and check the vents and this is what I found
These are pics of the fan(above the heatsink)



Then, I removed the fan to get at the actual heatsink itself
Take a look at what I saw:



By the time I had got the camera ready, the fan in my room had already started to blow some dust away.
The first pic is blurred but gives a better idea of the amount of dust there was, it was literally stuck to all the vents

I got some compressed air and fully cleaned em out heatsink fins and the fan, and the temps are much better now
In line with all other laptops.

After playing CoD4 on the laptop for a few hpurs, the peak temps reached were much better
Check em out:


Also, now my CPU idles on the 30s, and the GPU in the 40s which are also much cooler than before

Sorry for the big pics
what else is new

PS - Just realised Rich has had an effect on me

 

LOL Being a smoker, you can imagine my fight with dust

I have custom cut foam air filters inside the front panel of both cases. Or even the Cooler Master Centurion has them stock They clog up eventually but I just pull off the front and blow it out every couple weeks.

@abuzar

Nice find Put a 9600 in it or something.

 

Haha, yeah either that or if I can find a cheap 8800gt or something. I need to buy some conductive pen for that pinmod though lol.

Ray, that's crazy! I might need to open up my laptop too, it overheats quite a bit hahah.

 

You are in luck. I am going to upgrade to a gtx 260 this week and i am looking for someone to buy my 8800gt with an aftermarket zalman vf900 on it. If you are interested i was going to sell it for around $75.

 

It's funny
All my friends and people I hang out with in school are heavy smokers, always smoking before class, but I never smoked a single one
I resist peer pressure somehow :S lol

It was crazy

But the thing is Saudi Arabia is a very dusty place, which is hell for electronics, sandstorms all the time
Everything gets covered in dust even with all the windows closed

Another reason is also that I never pack up notebook

How's the studio going boozer

 

Hi Guys,

Another week in LA getting Vanessa moved in and fixing things. And then I came back and loaded Medal of Honor - Pacific Assault, and it won't support 2560x1600. It's an older title - goes up to 1600x1200, so the screen expands it out. It runs a little laggy - I wonder if that's the screen trying to scale the image. I found the config file but I don't see any of the screen resolutions in there. Maybe a visit to that wide screen gamer forum is called for.

The MOH game doesn't look quite as great as I had remembered. On the other hand, I just played back through Call of Duty 2 and it, by contrast, looked MUCH better than I had remembered. And I don't remember all the really RED blood that is all over the place now when you blow a Nazi away, or when one of your buddies buys the farm. And for that matter, I don't remember all the new tricked out nazi rifles with the bluish tinting like you can customize on COD4 multiplayer. They are lying around everywhere - they aren't my choice of rifle or I'd start using them for the bluing - they look really cool! I don't know if all this blood and bluish tinting is shader 3. Also the smoke and haze look a million times better than I remember - of course before I wasn't playing on an LCD - not to mention the Dell 30" monster! So I am guessing that shader 3 from my 3850 has a lot to do with the new really great picture of COD2 - the strong x850xtpe card I played it on before was shader 2 only. The game really looks good and of course fully supports the 2560x1600.

So regarding Medal of Honor, laggy play, 1600x1200, 16:12 scaled to 16:9 - the round gun sites are squished slightly sideways hahaha. I really probably shouldn't go back that far - maybe just stay with the more recent games like the Brothers in Arms series prior to Hells Highway, and maybe Far Cry, and maybe Medal of Honor Airborne which will be kind of laggy - I already tested the demo. That's why the cheap new build has some appeal - 4850x2 for under $300, 6600, mobo, cheap 4 gigs ram - under $700 total in the same case and same psu.

You don't have any loud computers, Estuansis, but if I put the 4850x2 in, Sam says I will have one very loud machine lol. Still, I am thinking of doing just that - I game with headphones, so for now, so what do I care? For later, as a second gaming machine, out in the "public" sunroom with speakers, I can take out the loud card, sell it on ebay, and put some quiet Ati 5000 card in there, or use the zalman vf900 idea.

By the way, estuansis, nice sig!

So Sam, you're definitely saying Quad is best for multiple gpu support - shaff said the same. If I go cheap for now, it will be the q6600 and the ud3 board - but are you saying the p45 chipset will screw me for realizing full advantage of the 4850x2 dual gpu?? versus the x48 chipset -

The ud3 board is about $150 with a nice $30 rebate - the x48 board we talked about with full x16 on both pci-e slots, was going to be about $289 - is there a cheaper x48 board - maybe just a one-slot - that will let me take full advantage of the 4850x2 card?

From what you're saying, the 4850x2 must be hella loud! Hahaha. But that bit about the zalman vf900s sounds interesting. I googled - heat pipe cooler and large fan - you think two of those will fit on the 4850x2 VERY long board?? Those coolers look gigantic!!

My apologies to everybody about the mistaken information regarding Warhead - I had been remembering Far Cry 2. Here is the chart from the Tech Report Jan 15th article on the gtx295, not 2560x1600, but only 1920x1200 - and you guys are right, gamer setting, not enthusiast. Here's the picture - notice the purple line compared to the red line, the purple line being the 4850x2, and the red being a single 4870.



The graph I was referring to was Far Cry 2. Here it is. Look at that purple line on the far right. This is where the 2 gigs on board kills the 512mb in crossfire (the brown line plumetting to 15 fps) - notice the 42 fps purple at full 2560x1600 - whereas the single red line 4870 is down below 30.

That really sounds nice!

So you were talking about jacking up the voltage to 1.5 to get it to 3.87, which you didn't want to do because of the heat. So where did you finally end up on clock and NB voltage - and what kind of 3dmark 6 are you getting out of curiousity?

(By the way, that rampage that sophocles uses, and the more expensive chip - adds at least $200 or so to the system cost, wouldn't you say?)

Anyway, how are we now doing on the dual 4870x2 - is it finally working well for you? You said it was your biggest technical challenge of your career. And are you getting the performance increases you were expecting?

Wow Ray (this long post is for you to complain about again, lol) nice job on opening up that laptop. I wouldn't have the guts to do that, but watching you now, maybe some day I will. One hundred degrees on the cpu hahaha. Was there any malfunction? Did you smell anything funny? Did your smoke detector go off? Hahahahaha. (Do you still live in the same house or did you have to move when that one burned down.)

I think we can safely say boozer that you are not a rabid gamer, having better things to do like the boat club. Sure, get a computer for free and throw a 4850 in it. Why not a 4850x2 - REALLY LOUD - and then we can compare if your 4850x2 is louder than my 4850x2. Hahahaha.

Wow Kri - the zalman vf900 that Sam just mentioned surfaces again on your 8800 card.

If you think Sam, that two of those largish Zalman things will fit on the very long card, then that might ultimately be the noise answer for the 4850x2. But still I need your answer on motherboard - if the p45 chipset is bad for crossfire, what x48 would you recommend that will come in around the $150 price point of the ud3, maybe with just one pci-e slot or a reduced speed second pci-e slot, (because at the most I might add a third 4850gpu, not four gpus.)

Rich

 

HAHA

Only damage was a melted pen that was near the laptop exhaust

It's all good now though
Going to start running 3DMark06 soon and maybe OCing the graphics card

 

Lack of support for a native resolution will not affect performance, if the game lags, it's either the game itself (I haven't heard of any issues like that with MOH) or your system can't keep up.
The scaling required for my HD3870, and even my X1900XT to get games to run 2560x1600 did not have any performance impacts.
Have a gogle and see if you can find a patch for the game to run it at 2560, most games from around 2003 onwards have the means to apply custom resolutions via a config file.
Hehe, you will often think "this doesn't look as good as I remember" visiting a game you played a long time ago, the more graphics increase in quality, the more critical you become of them.
Shader Model 3 does make quite a difference to graphical quality in some games, so you may indeed find some new things you never remembered spotting - the X850XT PE was the most powerful Shader Model 2 only card I think there has ever been.
Don't forget Rich, to save squashing the game up, even with your HD3850 you can use the image scaling feature - you don't have to put it in a 1:1 box either - you can scale it to fit the screen, but preserve the aspect ratio, so there is only black space to the left and right.

Everything I've read suggests the HD4850X2 is one of the loudest cards there has ever been, and having owned a very similar card, also from Sapphire (remember the HD4850X2 is an unofficial product that only Sapphire have produced, not unlike the X1950 for AGP from Gecube, except with far fewer problems!) this would not surprise me in the slightest - the Sapphire HD3870 I had was diabolical.
Thanks to the PCI express 2.0 interface, single dual cards like the 4850X2 and 4870X2 will be relatively unaffected by using a P45 chipset, as the lane will still run at 16x with only one card installed. However, using two cards will cut both slots to 8x, and that gives serious performance drops even with two single GPU cards installed. With two Dual cards, you probably wouldn't even see any gains from using one card, when the going gets tough. An X48 is mandatory for dual X2s and Quad Crossfire.
As far as I know, all X48 boards have two 16x slots, as there's no point in only having one, since proper PCIe bandwidth with two cards (again, remember that with only one physical card, X2 or not, the P45 performs very similarly) is pretty much the only advantage to owning an X48 board in the first place.

HD4850X2 with two VF900s:

The card looks absurd compared to the board, but remember this is a compact ATX board, full ATX boards will use the extra screwholes you can see to the right, but they do stop right there. The overhang of the card is considerable, and I am quite sure the HD4850X2 would actually be incompatible with the case I use, the NZXT Lexa (But not the Tempest, provided you didn't use HDDs in the slots adjacent to the graphics card)

An interesting point about the Far Cry 2 benchmark, as with many other games, you notice how the 512MB HD4870s in CF crumble due to lack of memory. Also consider the gradient of the GTX295 compared to two GTX285s, it's much less severe - and given how high the frame rate is at 1680x1050 with them, it doesn't look like a CPU limit is affecting the results - the GTX285 SLI pair takes far less of a hit from 2560 with AA than the GTX295 - this is due to the full-on 1GB memory on each card. Believe it or not the 896MB for the GTX295 isn't enough, and in some games, due to nvidia's weaker memory optimisation, it drops right down to nil, as you might have spotted in the graphs I posted earlier. This isn't something many people talk about regarding the GTX295 and/or its Quad SLI, but I think is of paramount importance, as if the cards can't do 2560x1600 with AA at all, then what's the point of owning one? A single HD4870 or GTX260 would suffice outside that zone.

The voltage of my CPU seems pretty much irrelevant, thanks to having a G0 stepping chip, that's never been an issue, it's the chipset voltage with the problem. The more speed, the more volts are needed, and the more cooling is needed.

My 3dmark06 is 22,300, as with the CPU at 3.87, GPUs 3 & 4 only energise halfway through 'Canyon Flight' and remain shut down during the other three (and of course the two CPU) tests, as the draw from them is too low - I confirmed this using a power meter. Such a small amount of usage means the extra GPUs don't affect the score much.
Contrastingly, my 3dmark Vantage has risen by nearly 60%.
Having now upgraded to a much more stable driver (or, seemingly so at least), Catalyst 9.2, Quad Crossfire is finally working out. I've left my CPU at 3.65 as I always did before, and at hot LAN events I raise the side fan speed to the full 1250rpm the Noctua I have put there allows. Normal circumstances it's dropped to 700rpm or so. I think it's all done now (apart from probably putting the Zalman PSU back for quietness, and so I can return/sell the more expensive PSU and get some of my money back!)
Ultimately, I can't comment on which X48 board is best, I only bought one of Gigabyte's most expensive, the DS5, as it was the only one in stock that I felt like using. The Rampage Formula, perhaps the only board from Asus I consider to be an excellent buy, was more expensive still, and the cheapies were either out of stock, or had very soso reviews at overclocking quads.

Lastly, with regard to three GPUs, just remember that going above two GPUs has far fewer gains than using two, both in % scaling, and how many games support it - I still think it's worth it for top performance, but if you do go ahead, use 4870s not 4850s, for the fact that three HD4850s (whether three cards or an X2 and a single) are only 20% ahead of one HD4870X2 when they are scaling, and will be 30% behind when they don't, and will cost a fair amount more.

As for the laptop temps, one of the guys at Fragsoc this weekend had his GPU running at 110C all event, he enlisted the aid of a desk fan to help control things... Laptop graphics get hot!

Nice to hear from you again Rich

 

Yeah, nice to be back, and thanks Sam - that last post was very helpful - answered a lot of questions - just a few are left.

Sam, I presume you're referencing a catalyst feature, is that correct? I was having so much trouble getting 3dmark6 to run that I took catalyst off and just installed the drivers. But now that I know how to do driver-clean, I can try again with the latest catalyst. So I don't have to do the letterbox with the 1:1 pixel mapping? Interesting tip. But again - I DO have to have Catalyst, right?

Oh, I see. That's the main reason for the x48 chipset - to give you the fast dual 16x gfx slots. I didn't know that. So from what you just said, the p45 ud3 will be fine for now - but if I throw even a single gpu 4850 in the second slot, both slots will drop to 8x and I imagine, since the gain from the third is so slight anyway, it would be negated by the slowdown of an 8x bottleneck on the 4850x2. Sounds like virtually zero reason to ever add a third gpu to a p45 card - am I following you?

If that is all correct, then I might as well save a few bucks and get a non-crossfire board with just one 2.0 pci-e 16x slot. Which gigabyte p45, around the $50-$100 mark, would you suggest? I would probably not do any overclocking at first, for fear of excessive power draw, since I would be trying to get by on my Corsair 450 PSU (the Tech Report bench showed TOTAL SYSTEM DRAW with a 4850x2 under load to be only 375 watts.



Here is their test rig system - I don't see that I would be drawing any more power wattage with my system, at 5 fans, 1 dvd burner, one floppy, one hard drive, Q6600 and 4 gigs main memory:


Would you say that my power draw would be any greater than theirs? If not, how much overclocking headroom do I have with the spare 75 watts of power - ZERO?? hahahaha. I know I'm cutting it thin - dissecting the pennies as it were lol.)

Thanks for that beautiful picture, hehe.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

That certainly proves two zalman vf900s will sit on that board - just barely - they're actually WEDGED against each other, hahahaha. (That's another reason the 4870x2 wouldn't work - it lacks the one inch extra length you'd need for those twin zalmans, lol.)

That LONG board won't really fit in my little 20" deep PC case either - it will fit in the antec 1200 but that stays on the shelf for the new build. But I'll make it fit even if I have to get out the hack saw - definitely adjusting the hard drive as necessary - and notching out the hard drive cage as required, lol. As I said I'll only be running one hard drive anyway, a 540 gig Western Digital ide. I'll put four partitions on it, my present C drive w98 in the first partition (or can I just put the boot.ini file in the first partition and forget about w98?) and clone my present D drive XP 165 gig to the second largest partition, then two little partitions of 25 gigs each for vista and windows 7.

But maybe I SHOULD run a second hard drive and put a 4 gig XP virtual memory swap file on it, for a little speed enhancement from the second head - would that be a factor in gaming - probably not, with 4 gigs, and 2 more of Vram, XP won't have any part of the game on the swap file anyway, will it?

Hey thanks for the tip about the patch - there is a patch that is supposed to polish up several of the game levels - I don't see anything about 2560x1600 but maybe they did that too. And by the way, that 60% gain you got on 3dmark Vantage - impressive! Interesting that 3dmark6 doesn't turn on the other gpus hardly at all. But I will love to have over 22000 points one day, lol!

Rich

 

KRJ, I'm gonna have to pass for now. Sorry, no money right now, I need to save up lol.

Ray, that studio is great! I really like it. Just need to maybe open it up and see how dusty it is.

Rich, nah I'm not a rabid gamer. I used to be able to keep up with Sam just cause of e-peen but then he went all crazy on us and bought all that expensive as hell shit haha.

 

Yeah, Sam is a hard act to follow. I'll linger on behind a bit while he figures all this good stuff out. Or maybe I'll start a boat club, like I keep telling you to do, lol. (Seriously, I might join one of the boat clubs I used to belong to in Newport - $30 a month and then I can rent the boat anytime for about $100 on the weekend - nice 30' sailing boats - take out 10 people, no problem, kitchen, head and all down below! I used to take the $30 as a business expense - you know - for taking out customers. Yeah sure. Hahaha.)

 

lol Rich, I can't do the boat club thingy! Maybe later but not now haha. Plus my parents would want to come along which is no fun!

 

That is indeed a feature in Catalyst. If you don't install Catalyst I think ATI still put a lot of image controls within an 'advanced' panel in the windows display settings, but it lacks a few important things - Catalyst A.I. for one, so you can actually disable the other GPUs... Hence, I don't use it and am not aware of exactly what it does and does not offer.

That's right about the P45, it's fine for two GPUs (assuming an X2, not two single cards), but any more, and the performance drops off a cliff.

A 450W VX would handle the system fine, but they are much noisier units when stressed than the HX, take note of that.
In Europe you can actually buy a 450W HX, but I don't think they're releasing that in the US market, rather strangely.

There are several reasons the two Zalmans wouldn't work on a 4870X2, the most important is the VF900 is too weak a cooler to cool an HD4870 GPU. These things were barely pushing better numbers than the stock cooler on the X1900s and X1950s. Thankfully the HD4850 GPU actually uses less power than those older cards. The HD4870 uses significantly more.
Then there is the matter of the board layout. The 4850X2 is designed differently to the 4870X2 as it's Sapphire's own design rather than an ATI reference, and on that basis I don't think the two coolers would fit either.

For what it's worth a system with 4 GPUs like me, but with a 4Ghz i7 940 scores 30,500 in 3dmark06. That is how much the CPU affects the score at this level.

Also, for more than 2 GPUs, Vista or Windows 7 are mandatory, XP can only support up to 2.

 

Boozer, of course you let your parents come along. Once! Hahahaha! They will be satisfied with that and you and your buddies will live the high life all the other times, lol.

Wow, that's a revelation! So you're running Vista full time now! Interesting! You're solidly over in the Shaff Vista fanboy camp LOL!!

I presume Vista will run everything you were running before on XP - Crysis, Warhead, Far Cry 2, etc.

PSU-wise, sounds like you're agreeing that my 450 Corsair will handle the load - but at the expense of some extra noise. This is going to be one noisy little case hahaha. So now that I'm back to p45 on this little someday-to-be-the-second machine, what gigabyte p45 single pci-e do you like?

Regarding your 4 gpus, I'm still waiting for you to swap out the Corsair for the 850 watt Zalman with the heat pipes to see if that brings you back into a more silent solution. So, looking back on it, the huge challenge that you faced - was it the motherboard? Was that change the final fix?

Also, the 60% increase in your 3dmark Vantage scores - is that indicative of the 30% - 60% gains you are getting elsewhere? Are you completely done with the BSODs? Has your system settled in to stable performance?

In other words, are you still trying to work out some kinks, or are you flying along pretty nicely now?

I'm very curious, as you can see lol, because there is a small chance that this one house that I thought was a dead deal might actually sell, and I would have about $4,000 in commissions that I didn't think I was going to have. If that happened maybe I would just put the $700 budgeted toward beefing up the current someday-to-be-the-second machine, toward the $2000 antec new build, and just do everything you just did. Hahahaha.

(But if the sale falls through - what p45 cheap gigabyte should I pick up - one of the $60 things - should I make sure it is at least a 2.0 pci-e 16x board versus 1.0?)

Rich

 

I wouldn't say that, I'm stil not sold on the OS, but it's not bad enough to be that mad about not having a choice..

My preferred single PCIe slot P45 board is the EP45-UD3R especially for chipset cooling reasons, something I'm taking far more seriously now.
The solution with the X48 was controlling the NB temperature, but the temps were never an issue with the single HD4870 in the top slot, and given the actual figures, they should hve been, I just don't think that board was up to the job of two cards. I'm pretty confident the board (although it still took some tweaking) was the real fix.
I have had only one crash in the last few days, which was due to running my side fan at minimum speed at a LAN (VERY high ambient temperature) - upping the fan speed, system has run like a dream ever since, including multiple hours of Left 4 Dead - a full 400% scale game (I reach the 300fps frame rate cap many times at 2560x1600 with 4xAA - with one X2 I never saw it reach 200, with Cat AI disabled it rarely breaks 90). Why use it then? When the going really gets tough, a single card drops to the low-mid 20s, an X2 the high 30s, low 40s. With 4 GPUs, I've never seen below 55. It's smooth as silk at max detail.