The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Yeah, Krj, I think Ati tray tools is just for Ati graphics cards - probably won't run for any of the nvidia products. Nice 3dmark6 at over 16,000.

Sam, thanks for the reminder about Riva Tuner. (Krj - Riva works for nvidia cards.) I forgot about it. I have never tried it, although I have heard a lot about it. If Ray Adam's ATT doesn't work for Vista, that's what I'll have to use. Yeah, I guess I was expecting too much out of 3dmark6. Is the steadily decreasing test score a function of xp memory leakage? I guess one should really reboot each time and close all background tasks, if one wants to try to achieve duplicable scores.

My real estate deal is almost dead - if it revives itself it will be a miracle - I'll know for sure next week. So it is very likely you'll be hearing from me about how loud the 4850x2 really is, lol. Hopefully with that board and the Q9400 from microcenter, currently priced below the Q6600, I'll get scores somewhere around what Krj is getting - maybe with a little bit of Q9400 overclocking (as long as I don't exceed my 75 watts of psu headroom.)
Rich

 

The decreasing score is just part of 3dmark06.

 

Hahahaha. Yeah, Sam, but why???

I could see it if you were accessing the web as you ran the program - well maybe you are. But I actually think I left my ethernet unplugged for a while there since that was what driver clean asked me to do. If you went out to the internet each time, maybe Futuremark would discourage you from running it all the time, for whatever reason - "ok guys enough epeen!"

But when you're running it on your local machine, and scores steadily drop, I think I would have to attribute that to the famous XP memory leakage, which I think means XP holding onto some main memory and paging memory in case you run the application again, resulting somehow in less memory next time. Or....maybe 3dmark6 leaves some threads running each time, increasing total running threads every time you use it if you don't reboot.

Let me ask you a different way Sam - I'm just curious. In your opinion, if I were to reboot each time, and kill all background tasks each time, could I reasonably expect duplicability on my 3dmark6 scores, would you think?

 

That's not how it's worked for me, and I can't explain it either.

 

ati tool actually does work with nvidia cards. i used it with my 7600gt and 8800gt for monitoring temps and light overclocking. the fuzzy cube was also very useful for scanning for artifacts. but it seems to have trouble with 64bit so i will use gpu z for temps and riva tuner for my overclocking.

 

ATITool does work for nvidia, but only older cards. It does not even support current ATI hardware, hence why people switched to ATI Tray Tools. The latter is incompatible with Vista64 though. Only Rivatuner (after some tweaking) seems to work with Vista64.

 

Wait guys, Sam and Krj - are we saying Ati Tray Tools and ATI Tools are two different utilities? I thought there was only one thing - ATT, which stands for Ati Tray Tools. Sorry for my confusion and erroneous information.

Wow, I finally went over to that website you gave us, Sam, interfacelift.com, with the 2560x1600 wallpaper. It took me 20 minutes to go back and find your link. I was too busy to bookmark it at the time, duhhh. (By the way, the website crashed internet explorer 7 several times for some reason - I went back to it on Mozilla and it worked fine, plus the downloads came down as jpgs instead of bmp files.)

Anyway, what a treasure! I sorted by widescreen, 2560x1600, and there were 801 photos. Two hours later I had picked out 71 favorites, of which 50 survived the selection process when I actually displayed them on the big Dell.

(I repeat, if anybody wants the small 1.5mb exe of the original free webshots, before they messed it up, let me know. It stores the wallpapers as thumbnails, changing them hourly, daily, weekly, or never, and also serves as your screensaver.)

I had picked out the photos on my 17" Sony CRT, which is my everyday computer that I am on right now. But the photos absolutely EXPLODED with rich color and high def presence on the 30" Dell.

I swear, all I could think of was the very strange thought: "Sam you SOB - you held out on us for all those years - not really letting us in on how fabulous the 30" experience really is" Hahahahaha.

One of the first ones I tried out on the 30" monitor was "space needle" - a gorgeous shot of Seattle with the magnificent Space Needle front and center. The detail and variety of colors is just amazing! The power of that one shot convinced me to pour through all 801 selections.

I even ended up registering with interfacelift.com because I wanted to post a comment under "Tree Snake on Branch" - a decent (but not spectacular - I kept it anyway) picture of an emerald green tree boa that I actually owned in high school. If you do a quick search for "tree snake" you'll find the picture and my longish (yeah Ray what of it heh) comment on the bottom about buying and owning that snake. I was a big reptile fanatic in my day!

Did I read at one time that there are actually no snakes at all in the British Isles? (No - wrong again - I googled, there are all of 3 snake species, one of them the poisonous adder. Not an abundance of snakes to be sure, but more than zero!!)

Rich

 

Haha yeah, well, how else could I have better put it in words?
ATI Tray Tools, and ATITool are two separate programs, ATI Tray Tools is more modern and complex, but I've never tried it myself. ATITool is pretty redundant nowadays apart from the fuzzy cube artifact check, which only works with one GPU, and doesn't do anything 3dmark won't as far as stability testing goes.
You were almost right Rich, but there are no snakes in Ireland. (or so I read) There are some in Britain, however, though grass snakes and adders are as bad as it gets, and I'm pretty sure I've never seen an adder.

http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/ReptilesAmphibians/NewsEvents/irelandsnakes.cfm

 

Okay so I finally got FEAR 2 installed yesterday and I've played maybe 6 hours total of the campaign. So I'll just score it out.

Graphics: 9/10

Project Origin uses the same Lithtech engine as FEAR and the base geometry and texture detail seems mostly unchanged. Not that this is a bad thing. The original was very sharp in this regard. But the shader effects have been upped significantly as well as the environmental detail and visual "clutter". Blur, motion blur, depth of field, better water and fire, noticeably more detailed lighting, more objects, particles and the like. It looks more visually spectacular and detailed as a whole and is a marked improvement from the original. The screen is much more visually "busy" at any given time compared to the original. It comes very close to being a Crysis killer in many spots. There are no rough areas to speak of either.

Basically they took FEAR 1 and turned the special effects way up past ridiculous. Lots of visual splendor to be had in this game.

Gameplay: 7.5/10

FEAR 2 is slightly worse than the original, IMO, gameplay wise. The original perfected small engagements and gave them that subtle "cat and mouse" like tension. FEAR 2 throws more enemies at you and it quickly devolves into an average "run and gun" shooter. Some creepy new enemy types lose their shock factor quickly by being really easy to kill and too slow to keep themselves out of sight. Solid shooting and "create your own cover" mechanics make up for this though by making the firefights fun nonetheless.

The "scary" parts are much less subtle as well as being too often so they don't give me that eerie spine tingling sensation like the original did. The game is still scary as all hell though and a fair few parts will have your heart pounding.

The level design could also use some work as I find myself lost or turned around frequently. This was much the same for FEAR but it is more noticeable in FEAR 2. And some of the engagements feel too "big" for the space they're in. Like they just throw too many enemies in at once and the area feels crowded.

Performance: 10/10

Simply spectacular. Any recent video card paired with just about any dual core processor can max this game. It plays all maxed on the 9600GT and AMD X2 at 3.2GHz with 2xAA and 16xAF at 1680 x 1050. Averaging about 45FPS with little to no lag whatsoever. The motion blur is spectacular for keeping <60FPS nice and smooth.

Using the latest Cat 9.2 drivers gives excellent near 100% Crossfire scaling. All maxed at 1920 x 1200 with 8xQAA and 16xAF is buttery smooth on the Crossfire rig. Averaging over 140FPS with zero lag and minimal loading pauses. I see no issues to be had if you're running at 2560 res, even with heavy AA.

This game seems to heavily favor ATI hardware. Firingsquad performance results showing comparable ATI cards stomping their Nvidia counterparts badly. The HD4870 actually outpaces the GTX280 in this game, if I've read correctly.

Sound: 10/10

FEAR has always had very strong sound design, and the sequel is no different. The weapons sound effects are satisfyingly rich and hit my subwoofer just right. You can hear the vocal communication between the enemies just as well as you can hear the tell-tale "clink" of a grenade landing on the tile floor next to you. Sound also plays a huge factor in some of bigger set pieces. In particular, a falling train car in a collapsing subway tunnel had my whole room shaking as I heard every single piece of concrete and shattered glass fall around me.

Overall: 8.5/10

While FEAR 2 doesn't quite match up to the polish and suspense of the first game, it is still well worth your time. The visuals are stunning and some of the big scenes are absolutely incredible. The sometimes screwed level design and dumbed down combat are the only things keeping it from being one of my favorites for game of the year.

 

I think the textures have also been improved, personally. Not a huge amount, but enough to let the improvements to the postprocessing and pre-processing effects completely transform the game's graphics.

The gameplay is a mixed bag, as I agree the standard combat isn't quite the same but it does offer a similar level of combat strategy as the original, provided you play on Hard (anything but Hard is a joke). The sections with Alma were much less scary, and frankly disappointing, especially the 'hammer right click and left click' sections, as you'd still live even if you got them wrong, as simple as they were.
The genuinely scary sections though (the school, its underground section, and the area upstairs before you arrive at the nurse's office in particular) were fabulous. Genuinely sweat-breaking stuff on Hard.

Performance is good for the game, as I played it at 2560x1600 4xAA not even realising that there was no crossfire profile for it. (I played with 9.1, good to see they've added a profile for it now) The performance could be better at that setting before I'd call it smooth, but how many other games do you see running relatively well at 2560x1600 with AA on a single 4870 these days? FEAR always did run well on ATI hardware since the X1000 series, so the sequel should be no exception.

 

Yeah I noticed the level of visual fidelity is slightly higher than in FEAR 1. This is saying a lot for the game too as FEAR is still one of the greatest examples of high res gaming. All the new effects are a welcome addition and add substantial eye candy to a game that was - and still is - a visual masterpiece.

Agreed. You basically need to turn it to hard to match FEAR 1's normal difficulty. FEAR was one of the few difficult games that I thought needed it for the atmosphere and tension. Turning it any lower breaks it down into a shooting arcade. At hard though, the enemies show much of the same great AI from the original.

Yes the new drivers make a great difference for me. One card ran it really well and Crossfire was almost overkill. It still drops a bit in intense situations, but I blame that on my 512MB cards. Constantly over 60FPS anyway. Works for me

 

Haha - yeah Sam, there are some things that no words will work for. You tried. That one thing you said, "gorging on pixels" is the strongest phrase which I guess ultimately clicked with me. LOL

Jeff, another brilliant review! "Visual spendor" "close to being a crysis killer" My favorite:: "turned the special effects way up past ridiculous" Hahaha. Another favorite part: "...a falling train car in a collapsing subway tunnel had my whole room shaking as I heard every single piece of concrete and shattered glass fall around me."

Wow! What a beautiful piece of writing!

I want to get the game, despite the few negatives, dumbed-down combat, etc. I just wonder how it would run on the 4850x2. (The real estate deal miraculously saved itself, MAYBE, and if it closes by the end of this month - I may just follow Sam's lead with the dual 4870x2s.) I swear, Estuansis, you could work for some of the gaming magazines - your prose is powerful.

Well, between the two of you guys, sounds like a worthy game - I never played the original because I didn't like the demo - the shootout in the storage room. I didn't like the environment of that room. But I must have missed the essence of it, because everybody else keeps talking about the game!

I just finished catalyst hell, and no fault of Ati. I finally concluded that Spearhead - and only Spearhead - will not run on a 3850 agp card. For no good reason it freezes. I can run on safe mode, looking very ugly, 480 x 640 if you can believe, 16 bit colors and textures - UGLY - and it freezes. ATT is telling me 20% cpu and 20% gpu load. I can kill ATT, CCC and almost everything else, and it still freezes. Max resolution is only 1280x1024. I removed the game, and re-installed it. It freezes. Spearhead is one of the two expansion packs for the original Medal of Honor Allied Assault from the "Infinity Ward" 2015 group that created the Medal of Honor series for EA, before they packed up, formed Infinity Ward, and headed over to Activision to do COD. Before they left they did the expansion pack called Breakout, which runs ok at max 1280x1024 (I have to kill all background except for ATT - I love having that on-screen display when I want to check fps, gpu temp and fan speed, and load on cpu and gpu.) And I can run Allied Assault itself on 1600x1200 killing everything - it won't even start if I leave ATT running.

But Spearhead - no. Funny because I got through the first section and only had trouble when I met up with the Brits and we went to drive the nazis out of the house with the cannon, on our way to do the bridge. I reloaded the game. I reloaded Catalyst. I found the 9.1 Catalyst with the hotfix for 3800 agp card - I thought - "There's my problem, the agp version of the card is creating problems."

It freezes. Nothing works. The game won't run!! Bizarre. But it's the worst of the series anyway - it was Spearhead the one review talked about when they said "Spearhead showed us that the guys from 2015 had gone" "Let's see how EA does with Pacific Assault."

And I already played it before on my x850xtpe (zero problems) so no big loss. It was okay, maybe 6/10.

On a more positive note, I was testing Breakout. At one time I got some temporary freezing, blasting things from a tank. That caused me to turn off ATT. But later testing allowed me to turn ATT back on, and I am running with everything maxed, only 30% loads, max of 1280x1024.

Breakout is amazing! That's all I can say!

It starts with an absolutely intense, gripping level of fighting in a SEVERE sandstorm in the African desert, with visibility of about 20 feet. On the big dell, words don't do the experience justice. I need the power of Estuansis' prose.

Let me just say - a mind-blowing sandstorm plodding battle, that two hours later made me want to go drink quarts of cold water and bathe in Nivea to get over my severe de-hydration and parched skin.

Thank god for the quick save feature or I would have gone nuts playing the level over and over again - extremely boring on some of those games, like Far Cry, where on hardest setting, an enemy, lurking noiselessly in waiting, kills you after an hour of extreme intensity, just before the save point.

For 15 minutes I couldn't get out of one trench and past a burnt out truck, before they massed on me - one time I yelled out loud past my headphones, "What is this, a f**king party!" Lol. Finally I figured out to drop back behind the wire to the trench when they started rushing.

Anyway, the Quick-Save makes the impossible, possible. It took me 10 tries even to survive the first five minutes when the Captain drops me off in his jeep and hightails it out of there, telling me to "Punch a hole through, Sergeant." My character has to have one helluva reputation for him to have confidence of me being able to push through that sandstorm hell.

At one point I had 5 life and because of a mistake - I jumped into a tank with lots of life and thought that was me - I kept on going. Later, when I jumped out of the almost-destryed tank and saw my 5 life "WTF!" I had zero space for mistakes and I played better than possible - advancing inches at a time, peering deep into that sandstorm for the slightest shadow of a figure - coming around corners of the trenches with the itchiest of trigger fingers.

That was the Infinity Ward expansion pack - and what a helluva game and what a helluva immersive experience on the big Dell. Even at 1280x1024 - (keeping aspect ratio, using catalyst to expand to full height) - I would have to give it a 9.6/10 overall, exceeded only by COD4 which I think I gave a 9.8. Un-f**king believable - the kind of thing we rabid games (excluding boat club boozer lol) live for!

Rich

 

The funny thing is that FEAR 2 really isn't that far behind Crysis in terms of visual quality. It's more consistent, has working AA (though they fixed that in Warhead) and is really wonderful to look at. I its best areas, Crysis still wins out, but not by a huge amount, and as I said, a 1GB HD4870 can run the game at literally absolute max with only a very minor lack of fluidity, it doesn't really ever lag, just drops to perhaps 25-30fps, which is hardly problematic in the way Crysis' frame rate is. The only real problem with FEAR 2 is the saving, which like the first game, completely locks the system for a second or two whilst it's taking place. Very few games still suffer this problem, so that's disappointing. Quicksave and Quickload has ben removed, the saving grace of which perhaps is heightened difficulty. Sadly, the autosave points are now much more frequent as a result. Console anyone?
Now that CF has been enabled in the game, an HD4850X2 would almost certainly max the game out at 2560 with no issues whatsoever.

It was actually a bus Estuansis (assuming we're talking about the same thing) but that section is definitely what MAKES the game. The water falling off is beautifully rendered, and the noise it makes when it falls and the effect on your screen is truly something right out of a theme park ride.

The HD3800 series had a lot of compatibility issues with older games, including the PCIe ones (and even some newer ones). I'm pleased to say the HD4800 series has fixed these issues (it was not drivers, it's specific to the card). Compatibility with ancient titles is still not perfect, but the HD4800s are much better than the 3850/3870 for running non-current games, and all games in general.


On another note, I stuck the Zalman PSU back in my system. Man, I'd forgotten how quiet the thing is. The electrical whine from the chokes on the X2 has reappeared from the fog of fan airflow noise. I'm also curious to see what effect the PSU will have on my chipset heat issues. On one hand, the lower PSU fan speed means lower airflow through the system, but on the other hand, lower PSU fan speed means less air being sucked up from the graphics cards past the chipset...

 

Good point, Sam. Your NB overheating turned out to be the cause of the perplexing BSODs as I recall. I asked you one time about a North Bridge additional cooler and as I recall you had already tried something like that - hadn't you?

So the whine of the x2 chokes has emerged from the reduced airflow noise cacophony - hahahaha - is that a good thing or a bad? - just kidding.

The Zalman sounds like a terrific product - hope that chipset overheating problem doesn't re-emerge. I take it your PSU is at the top of the Lexa case - for a bottom-mounted PSU there would be no side benefit to the faster fan on the HX - am I right about that?

Regarding Fear2, Jeff remembered train, but it was actually a bus falling down that shook the earth? "Right out of a theme park ride!" Wow! I'll have to get that game!

Both of you guys are good with the words!

It sounds like an epic event - wonder how my 5.1 Medusas will render it? Probably not as good as the sound systems you guys have - for one thing my whole body won't actually shake with the pounding of woofer reverberation! LOL

So the Spearhead freezing was a card issue, the 3850 itself was the culprit - nothing to do with drivers. That began to occur to me - everything else had been mostly ruled out. That's a relief to know, I suppose. Even more of a relief to hear that the 4000 series doesn't suffer as much from those problems.

Ultimately, this has shown me that I guess I still don't understand much about the concepts of gpu architecture. I would have thought that the Spearhead programmers would write their code using routines in the shader and dx8 libraries - and as long as they conformed to open gl specs I would wonder why a particular card would have a problem with a particular title.

Are we saying that something about the architecture of the shader 3 HD 3800, rather than helping it blaze through older shader 2 games, actually had the unforeseen consequence of limiting its ability to process those simpler data streams? And this was an architecture incompatibility that a driver fix couldn't address? Did Ati become aware of this and consciously took it into account in designing the 4000 family?

Rich

 

It's not that I'd already tried a different chipset cooler, it's that I can't really use one. Removing the chipset heatsink means removing the Vreg heatsink, and I don't really want to overclock a quad core without a heatsink for the Vregs, so my only option is to cut up the stock solution, i.e. void the warranty on a £200 motherboard.... :S

The Zalman 850W units are incredible. They're well priced, the quietest at idle of any PSU I know (Corsair HX/VX/TX, Seasonic S12, Antec Earthwatts and BeQuiet DarkPower included). I think the only quieter unit will be the Seasonic M12, and they have a steeper noise curve than the Zalmans. Runing at around 450W load the unit still remains dead silent after hours of use. Not tested continuous load at full 700W yet.
My PSU is indeed at the top. A faster PSU fan would potentially be productive in a bottom-mount scenario - as long as there was a bottom intake fan (for quad CF, side would suffice for a single card), the fan being at the back would suck in the ambient air produced by the bottom X2's auxiliary heatsink and stop the bottom of the case getting hot (as you may know, the Lexa is elevated on feet, and if I hold the bottom of the case at the back it's warm body temperature to the touch from all the heat coming out of the side coolers on the X2s). I don't think it would really be of any major benefit though, as I haven't heard of any stability issues by this part of the case heating up. If anything, the best thing you could do with a case with two X2s is block off the top from the bottom and run an exhaust fan round the side at the back, so the hot air from the X2s doesn't warm up the chipset. My chipset temps rose about 7 celsius when I first put an HD4870 in the top slot, let alone having an X2 there and another uunderneath.

I'll get you a screenie of the bus in FEAR 2 (but won't spoil the moment, you'll get the 'before' shot haha)

I'll be honest with you, you know as much as I do about why the HD3800 series doesn't play ball with some titles, it perplexed me from the length I had the card....

 

Hey guys me again

From you interesting reviews, looks like I'll have to check out FEAR 2, but I might wait until I actually play FEAR 1, which I have but didnt play yet

On another note, I installed Burnout Paradise yesterday and played for like 4 hours

I love burnout and this port really made me happy with the devs/producers

I cranked all the settings as high as they would go on 1280x800 (SSAO turned off), and I get a butter smooth 45 FPS, in areas with a lot of traffic this drop to the high 30s

Really pleased, as the game looks very nice visually, especially when you get wrecked and it goes into slow-motion mode and shows various parts of the car crumple like the hood
Good physics there

I'm a big fan one the Burnout series and this is a recent that port that has really lived up to my expectations, much better then other recent ports *cough* GTA *cough*

Also, managed to get 3DMark96 today, so I will see what score I get with stock GPU clocks

 

FEAR 2 Performance:

HD4870 1GB vs GTX260
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTIzNTMyMTE2MXEzZ2d0UjNQRVdfNF80X2wuZ2lm
(HD4870 1GB significantly smoother at 2560x1600 4x)

HD4870X2 vs GTX280/GTX285
30"
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTIzNTMyMTE2MXEzZ2d0UjNQRVdfNF8yX2wuZ2lm
(HD4870X2 significantly smoother at 2560x1600 and with 12xAA vs 4 or 8x)
24"
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTIzNTMyMTE2MXEzZ2d0UjNQRVdfNV8yX2wuZ2lm

(HD4870X2 obliterates GTX280 and GTX285 at 1920x1200, with silk performance with 24xAA)


Midrange performance at 24" with high levels of AA:
http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTIzNTMyMTE2MXEzZ2d0UjNQRVdfNV82X2wuZ2lm

 

Sam, the weird way that the older games runs on the 3850 is hard to understand.

Breakthrough, which I have been describing, (with that unbelievable sandstorm level) has a scene before they finish with the desert, where you are at the end of the bunker getting ready to blow up the munitions depot. As I entered the end of the hallway, where there are two rooms loaded with about 15 nazis, I suddenly felt major lag - I looked up and saw my ATT OSD, on-screen display, registering 11 fps.

I quit the program, deleted all background tasks, and went back to my last quick save. "Ah hah - back to over 30 fps" I told myself, with immense satisfaction, until I moved 2 more feet - again 12 fps this time - and I could not yet peer into the two rooms loaded with all those nazis. Nothing was going on, and my fps had dropped to 12 from over 30 in two feet of movement!

That made me think of what you just said - perplexing!!!

I understood your NB cooler situation this time - to improve from stock you'd have to cut off just that part of the heat sink which also fits the Vregs, voiding your mobo warranty. Well then, why not jury-rig a little tiny 40mm fan secured by a length of coat hangar wire - pointed right at that NB heatsink? Or if you don't like that idea, how about a length of flex tubing pulling in outside air from one of the front fans - pouring it out right on the nb sink? It sounds to me like that NB needs some special treatment!

I couldn't quite follow you on the fan placement for bottom-mounted PSU. So here are some pictures to explain my situation. Let's say I have the 850 zalman at the bottom of the Antec 1200 which is still priced at only $129 at microcenter.



As I have shown in the picture, the antec has three front intake fans, an optional side door intake, a top vent 200mm exhaust, 2 rear exhausts and the PSU makes 4 exhausts, and 4 intakes. The PSU is placed upside down, sucking maybe some of the 4870x2 heat from just above it and directing that out the back. There is a mount for an optional fan blowing right on the graphics cards - I picked up extra fans for the two optional positions.

So given that scenario - would you have me place a piece of non-conductive plexiglass, horizontally positioned, let's say - between the two back exhaust fans, allowing the lower exhaust fan to service the two 4870x2 cards, and the upper rear exhaust plus top exhaust to service the mobo chipset area? Or am I already well-enough serviced by two upper rear exhausts and a ceiling exhaust pulling that hot air out before the chipset can warm up so I don't need to consider horizontally paritioning the case?

You mention bottom intake fan. Are you proposing the following mod:



If you think that would be a good idea, I could mod some feet on that case, and I could mod a 120mm bottom intake fan just beyond the zalman PSU if there is room - I recall the zalman is extra long but I imagine there is space.

The part I didn't quite understand was this:

You're not talking about an exhaust fan on the side behind the motherboard, are you?

Anyway, regards partitioning the case horizontally - do you think that plexiglass idea has merit? Or am I going to be good with the big 200mm top exhaust and the two top rear 120mm exhausts:

Hey Ray, you're like me - I haven't played Fear 1 yet either. I might skip it and go right to Fear 2. Yeah, let's see what your 3dmark6 scores are with that gaming laptop - I'm going to make a wild guess, 11000.

Nice charts Sam - 4870x2 in general kicks ass at 2560x1600 and never falls below 30, unlike the green guys.

Rich

 

The HD3850 only has 256MB of RAM, correct? (As far as I know, all AGP cards are limited to 256MB due to the bus). Even at 1600x1200, it's not too hard to break that limit if a game uses high quality textures.

I've already attached a fan to the northbridge (but no half measures here, a 3500rpm 92mm screamer), and it had zero effect - it was sucking the hot air from the 4870X2 and blowing THAT over the northbridge - there was plenty of air moving, but it was very warm air moving around, you can't cool something by blowing hot air over it! Reversing the fan did not seem to change as the only direction the air has to go is hit the cooler of the X2 and bounce back up, same problem recurs.
Running a tube from anywhere else to the NB would be equally ineffectual unless the GPUs were isolated in a chamber from the rest of the system. The solution that did the trick was upping the side case fan speed. Sticking one of Russ' 50dB Silverstones there dropped the chipset temps by 20 celsius, enough to raise the chipset voltage to +0.25 (enough to get 3.87Ghz) but no higher.

The chamber idea with the 1200 would make sense, but you have to have exhaust air going out. A Zalman PSU on its own wouldn't be enough to do that. It's a tricky balance, as two 4870X2s rely on an intake fan nearby or they will get very hot, yet they also dump a lot of heat into the case that has to go somewhere. The side fan on the Antec cases is right at the back, when it would be better placed in the middle as it is on the NZXT Lexa.

The mod you mention in the second diagram is exactly how my case is laid out at stock, but there's only an 80mm fan at the bottom.

What I meant by the quote was a side fan in the normal position, exactly where it is on the Antec, and you'd have the side intake fan further along, nearer the front of the case. Preferably also at different heights to avoid the air going straight in and straight out.

 

No Sam, the agp 3850 has 512mb memory, unlike the gecube which had only 256mb. That was the surprising thing about it, when Powercolor first announced the agp adaptation. (As to whether that memory is being completely utilized given the agp adaptation - that I couldn't comment on.) Furthermore, Breakthrough, the expansion, is limited to only 1280x1024, (whereas the original runs up to 1600x1200, hahaha). So at that resolution, it's certainly not a texture memory issue, is it?

By the way, on a positive note, dispite the bizarre slowdowns, even at 1280x1024, Breakthrough scales up nicely, keeping 4:3 aspect ratio, to full size on the Dell 30". The image is nice - not COD2 nice, but acceptable for an older title. And like I was enthusing before - that desert sandstorm level just blew me away (pun intended hahaha.)

Well, forgive me for doubting you for a second, and thinking you might employ half measures - you had a 92mm 3500rpm screamer pointed straight at the NB little bugger. And when that didn't work you turned it around. Still no go.

Well, but how about a tube running all the way over to some part of the Hard Drive case, with a little 40mm fan pumping in air - or the fan could be at the NB end of the tube just as well I think. Certainly the hard drive part of the case must not be THAT hot - I know you have some front intake fans on the Lexa, right?

(Right now I am maybe the king of the flex tube people having adapted the sunbeam kit to pull fresh air in from the side onto my p4 hsf. LOL)

Ok, regarding the fan mods - I am with you regarding the bottom feet and the bottom intake - your Lexa has a stock 80mm intake. I can do that, or a 120 if I have room.

Regarding the side door:



Take a look at the new fuschia colored comments - skip the partition for a second.

Side door fans: If I follow you, you believe the side door intake fan should be forward of where antec has it, but you did want a fan where they do have theirs - as an exhaust fan I take it.

So to confirm, you are recommending the new fan - A - be an intake, slightly above the other fan so they don't push in and pull out immediately, with the standard optional fan B as an exhaust fan? Am I following you?

Partition: Back up top of the diagram to the partition - is my indicated positioning of a horizontal piece of plexiglass roughly correct - horizontally between the two rear exhaust fans?

With this partitioning, I am looking at the airflow of each section of the case.

Bottom of case airflow: I see that the bottom section, with the hot dual 4870x2 cards, is fed fresh air in, by the bottom modded intake, the new side door modded intake, and the two standard front intakes, (which get a little boost from the optional middle fan mounted behind the hard drive case which blows straight on the cards.) So we've got four intake fans. Airflow is aided by two exhaust fans - the lower back exhaust, and the side door exhaust fan B. For a little bit of balance, I could make sure those two exhausts are 1600 rpm fans - scythe S-flex now has a fourth speed I think - is it 1900 rpm?

Top of Case Airflow: If I am right so far about the bottom part of the case, then above the partition, the motherboard chipset is fed by the top front intake fan, and exhausted by the upper back exhaust, plus the ceiling exhaust. So in that case we've got one intake, and two exhausts - one being the huge 200mm. That might not be enough intakes. So here's a thought:



More upper intake: Maybe, as shown above, the upper back exhaust should be turned around and become an intake - so the chipset part of the case gets intake from upper rear and upper front, and exhaust from top ceiling fan.

Is this what you had in mind? Do you think this might work?

Rich