The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

400, 600, 800, and 1000?

How do you polish it? Maybe because it's used but my cooler has scratches on the bottom. That's probably affecting it as well. Huh, used CPU cooler has not been a good experience for me.

 

Yeah, I sort of thought that might be the case when you liked the idea of 800 wide for the forum. Maybe I'll post a 900 wide and see how that works.

So here's what I have so far:
dragnandy: 1920
greensman: 1280
me Rich: 1024 for forum computer
sam 2560 (fuggettaboutit!)
shaff 1920
abuzar whatever - he'll adapt he says (he changes equip every day lol
dinc ????? hasn't answered
estuansis 1024 for forum 17" computer - same size I use

No use messing up estuansis, and that means I don't have to change my desktop size - YAY!!

So dudes, we sort of have to standardize on lowest I think to keep the forum readable, esp for estuansis since he is big on screenies, so . . . I'll try a little bigger pic size, like 900 wide for you other dudes. That might work for me and estuansis on our 1024 desktops. Estuansis, do you want to reshoot the river, or just link me to the original 1024 wide shot and I'll save and resize.

Also, hint hint, still need the 1920 shot from you one day. If you noticed, Sam used your composition, dip in hills framed between two trees on left, and I'll be reshooting next week to get same. (Beginning of Riding Shotgun.)

Here's a 900 wide of Sam's river shot with estuansis' framing. Ultimately when I get estuansis' wide angle 1920 I'll crop that one and this one, to 4/3 aspect ratio, so we can get a good comparison of graphics quality across various gfx boards at various res. Cool!

 

How is everybody with that size pic above - 900? For me I can read forum without horizontal scrolling, but only catch a piece of poster's name, but that's ok I guess. What do you think estuansis - 900 pic size good for you on 17" monitor?

 

I really don't care either way. I can deal with scrolling a bit to see a pic. Kinda busy ATM though so be patient and I'll have the 1920 x 1200 up this weekend.

 

No problem m8, (these limies are converting me lol) when you get the nvidia 1920 shot, please link me to it at full size. And please also shoot your settings, like you did on the 1800. That way I'll probably end up posting the screenies, then the settings. We can discuss which settings seem to matter most for quality.

So when I get it full size, that will allow me to save it that way, but also save it cropped. Shaff turned me on to photobucket and wow, couldn't be easier to pop a picture on the forum. I didn't know what I was missing!

I'll probably end up cropping your wide angle and Sam's to 4/3, so we end up truly with everybody the exact same size, and then we can more easily distinguish between differences in image quality.

Also, if we're going to make 900 wide the new standard - liveable for you and me - better for all the other dudes - then please also link me to the full size 1024 river shot you just took with your x1800, because I only have the 800 wide version of that one that you posted.

No rush for sure because it will be Wednesday before I'm back on my gaming rig to reshoot the river with your composition - dip in hills between two trees.

So I finally figured out what UI is - I call it HUD - don't know where I ever heard that exactly. I probably won't mess with it, since sam is showing health. I'll just go with crowbar and turn off my ATT fps display for the shot. But if you think it's a big help to turn off the UI/Hud, I guess we could look up the command. If not, no need to say any more, we'll do it the way sam just did it, and you before on the x1800.
Thanks, Rich

 

If we're both running the same sort of settings but a different resolution, downscaling them isn't really going to help us find out what makes for better image quality.

 

Well, you have a point. I can link to the full image at the same time that I post the 900 wide, cropped. But are we going to have the same settings? You can run maxed, I can't, and I don't know if estuansis runs maxed on his nvidia. Perhaps the best is to put the link to the full image under every 900, easy to do.

How does that sound - your full image is incredible!!

I thought in addition to your maxed settings versus mine which aren't, the difference between your card (what are you running at this minute - 3870 I think, right?) and estuansis' nvidia might be interesting if you are able to spot some significant differences - shadows, textures, anti-aliasing, etc.

 

I'll try posting the same picture using different settings, and note the according frame rate. 25fps while fine for mooching around has a noticeable effect on real gameplay, so I can't reall justify using the beautiful settings you see in my picture on my HD3870.

 

Yeah you had mentioned 25fps and I kind of blocked it out of my mind - so EP2 maxed is definitely a graphics hog, huh? Makes sense with all that beautiful stuff goin on. Well, so really 35 is better, right, of course, and that sometimes would dip under 28 depending on the action I'm sure - how much of a dip assuming no cpu bottleneck in major action shots - 10 fps? Or does it totally depend on the complexity of the shot - how many objects moving around so you have to calculate what is in front of what else which I think is all done by the gfx, right??

Well, still I think I'd like to use your fully maxed shot, and we'll post that it's maybe not fully playable with that card 3870 because only 25fps, but at least here is what ati hardware delivers. When you move up to HIS 4850 what frames would you expect to get in that same place, 50? (I guess I could look back on your comparison charts, but not in front of me at the moment.)

 

Not really, 25fps is average at worst for maxed out. Vegas 2 manages around 20, Assassins Creed around 25, Crysis around 2-4, Supreme Commander around 15, Supreme Commander:Forged Alliance around 4-6, GRiD around 15-20, DiRT around 5-10.
Considering Crysis, HL2:E2 and SC:FA are the onyl games in that list to run 8x AA, 25 is pretty darn good. The original Half Life 2 at 75 and Counter-Strike Source at 60-150 are winners though.

 

Psst...
first signs:
http://www.extremepcs.co.uk/itemdesc.asp?ic=INMM310620

 

well at £170 a pop, i would have expected £350, esp seeing at its 2GB DDR5 but if it pushes the 4870 to £150 and 4850 to £100 id be extremely happy

 

It seems to say 324 including VAT...

 

IT'S COMING!!!

What is that in dollars - about $500 a card? Is this what Ray is going to be picking up?

My "buddy" Mo just dissed AMD some more when I went over there yesterday "Do you know, Rich, that their stock is only $5 a share?" I told him they were blazing new ground in mid-range graphics cards. Is this going to put them back in the black?

He hands me another 500 watt power supply - "Here, if you're worried, get this." It was a good, heavy PSU - about 5 pounds at least. I pulled out my glasses "This is only 20 amps on the 12 volt rail also, the same problem I have now."

That shut his nvidia fan-boy butt up. Why do I get the feeling that Mo doesn't get it any more than anybody else, it's not the watts, it's the friggin amps on the 12 volt rail. I think I'm back to my earlier idea of borrowing abuzar's AK "Allah Akhbar, change the PSU mo*f*ker!" Except he doesn't have anything in the shop better than that piece of sh*t he handed me - thanks, boozer, but I don't need the loaner right now, bro. lol

 

Most PC shops don't sell decent PSUs at all... seems his is no exception.

 

lol

Is your friend Mo, perchance, actually named Muhhamad? lol

 

Yeah, Mo is like all the others "500 WATTS - THAT'S A LOT!!! I'M A SYSTEM BUILDER AND YOU WOULD THINK I WOULD KNOW BETTER!!"

Yeah, "Muhammad." He's Persian. Just as well, if I tried that "Allah Akhbar!" threatening sh*t on him, he'd probably jerk out his own AK, and I would have to laugh nervously and confess that mine was a toy, "Just joking m8!" since boozer held out on me. LOL

 

Lol I'd stop listening to him then if I were you. Clearly you now know more about PCs than he does...

 

Mo is not into overclocking either. He laughed when I talked about newegg - he showed me a $600 service bill on a lady who told him she could save $50 instead of having him build a machine, by buying through newegg. He said, "Fine ma'm go right ahead, that is your privilege." First her son, who was supposed to be tech savvy, installed the mobo without the spacers, shorted it out and fried it. Mo saw that at a glance before she left his shop.

She ordered a new one from newegg. Mo went through, got it working, it died in 20 mins. turned out memory was bad. She rma'd the memory. A week later, same thing 20 minutes, computer dies. Again Mo diagnosed, 2nd mobo was bad. She said "impossible." She came to his shop, Mo put his own mobo in, she played with the machine for 2 hours, no problem. Mo put her mobo back in, again dead in 20 minutes. She rma'd back for the 3rd mobo from newegg.

Mo made huge money off of the service - he would have made less than $100 from the build. Moral of story, if you're not going to use a guy like Mo, or a guy like Abuzar, you better know what you're doing, and you better order quality parts to begin with.

The OCZ memory is now almost the same as the Corsair - about $5 more. One guy oc'd his 2.8 to 3.4. I have a 3.2 - maybe I can oc to 3.6 or higher. Since my cpu is going to be the bottleneck, I'll invest the extra $5 for the faster memory. It already has a sort of heat sink, but I'll probably arctic silver 5 some little copper heat sinks on it which I bought for the gecube, if they'll fit. Is that a good idea?

 

If there's one thing people like Mo are good for, it's cleaning up after messes you either don't understand or don't want to deal with, I've used such a service once. They do, however, overcharge. $600 service charge is absurd though. I sent in my old PC after it caught fire with my crappy 450W PSU, and said 'check every component', so they did, removed the faulty bits and returned them to me, installed a brand new 480W Hiper PSU (they were worth £50 back then), reinstalled windows on the main drive (as the data was lost but the HDD not killed), setup RAID on the two new drives I bought that overloaded the PSU in the first place, stress-tested the system, then handed it back to me, all for £100. That didn't seem bad to me...

Don't try and sink RAM yourself, either use the stock heatspreader, use a memory cooling fan like the ones Thermaltake produce, or go all out and buy a Thermalright HR series cooler.