The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Haha. Well, okay Sam, the system won't let me overclock the p4 even just a little without losing my sata drives.

I can't change the fsb from 200 to 210, or even 206, without losing my sata drives (I remember reading about that - some sata clocks are tied to the fsb clock. Now I remember why I bought that giant 500gig ide drive that's sitting in my "extras" box.)

So, cpu is back to standard -

what about the other changes:
1. DRAM to performance
2. AGP aperture from 64mb to 256mb
3. agp voltage from 1.55 to 1.7
4. memory voltage from 2.6 to 2.7.

Since your comment was about heat - I'll drop the two voltages back to where they were. What about dram performance and agp aperture size?

 

all AGP aperture does is adjust how much memory a graphics card can use for compatibility reasons, yours will already be set to the max, 256MB.

 

I don't quite understand that answer. My bios allows me to adjust that agp aperture up to 512mb. (That is how much memory I have on the 3850 card.)

You're good on DRAM set to PERFORMANCE mode, which was disabled before - probably allowing the system to increase memory clocks on the fly if it needs to and if temps are okay? It probably will never change my memory clocks so the setting probably won't help me anyway, lol

thanks. -rich

 

512MB perhaps, I thought the limit was 256MB, perhaps your board supports high aperture sizes. Either way there's no reason to lower it.

 

Yeah, I was also surprised to see the 512mb in the bios.

I have done some reading on agp aperture - one thing I read is that you can at most only use half of what you set it at - one half is cache, the other not ??

Another thing is that if I set it at 512mb, it won't take memory from main memory, but it is there if needed. Every 4k piece of the 512mb is mapped on a GART table in the northbridge (for speedy access to fragmented memory locations) and that if I run out of texture memory on the 3850 at 512mb, the system could start giving my gpu some of that memory.

I forget the disadvantages of a large aperture - but from some more reading it may be game dependent - one person (old post) with a 256mb graphics card noticed better performance and faster frame rates on far cry with aperture of 128 versus 64, but on some racing games, going above 64mb agp aperture caused that same person to have stutters every 5 seconds (as I guess the system accessed the slower pieces of main memory for textures.)

Anyway, with 512mb vram on my 3850, I'm probably fine but I set it at 128mb - somewhat up from the 64mb it was at.

Now I'll start the fan mod.

 

I haven't studied AGP much, it's been over three years since I've used it.

 

Yeah yeah, I get your point, lol.

Wow, the 120mm scythe went in, but good thing it's at the a** end of my computer that nobody sees - it ain't nearly as pretty as the other photos. In fact it's so ugly, that's where I'm gonna bury the spidey web pattern, hahahaha. Lots of sheet metal tearing and bending and hack sawing - what a mess.

Most of the metal came out with additional expansion ports - the case could have taken ports all the way to the floor - probably 10 in total. When I finished up I was careful to make sure none of the bent up sheet metal touched the mobo - wouldn't it be nice to take out my whole motherboard by installing a fan!

I powered windows up and everything works. Now I'll just balance the fans out with the beefier fans in the bottom section. The p4, no overclock at all (or lose my sata drives) will get the 800 rpm fans on ceiling and kama bay. The side and new rear exhaust will get the two 1600s, and the one 1900.

I hope this cools things off - the gpu temp with ATT renderer was running 97, 98, and 99 Centigrade! (Very hot day with my trailer/office at 96 F. and I'm with no shirt at all and shorts.)

If this doesn't work and cool things down and prevent crashes at decent fluid game play gpu overclocks - then I'll just have to run the A/C on gaming day!!

 

or get a better graphics card cooler...

 

Yeah especially AGP cards have sub-standard cooling. It was a major issue with the AGP 8x GeCube X1950XT. Usually the AGP cards are a completely different PCB and design so they tend to have quirks. Poor cooling seems the most common. Find a cooler that will fit your card and slap it on. The Zalman VF900 is fairly cheap and should work fine as it uses a somewhat universal mounting system. The cooler is pure copper with a highly polished base and should make a big difference in temps. It comes with heat sinks for the memory too so that should also help.

Of course that's just my suggestion. Check out some coolers and find something you like. At those temps I would say it might affect your performance too. Your card could be throttling down its clocks. If you get a new cooler and your 3DMarks or game FPS suddenly improves, you'll know it was a performance issue as well. Even if it doesn't improve your FPS I still suggest some sort of better cooler. Anything in the 90s is not healthy for any video card.

 

That was only a problem because gecube decided to use a Peltier, which is damn stupid.

 

Haha they put a Peltier element on the card? I wonder how many cards they killed with that

I mean isn't the idea of the Peltier/TEC cooler to be a sort of "heat-pump"? Fan failure = Frying the chip IIRC. If you don't aggressively dissipate the heat it builds up am I right?

 

Correct. A Peltier is about -20% efficient I think, so it takes 96W to cool 80W. Thus the 80-90W X1950XT ends up using even more power than a GTX275.

 

Hah hah. The Peltier nightmare. Another major problem with the gecube card was that the peltier kept falling off - it requires rigid contact to work. And yes, the secondary problem was all the extra heat. I found this forum when waymon started that thread about the gecube - thank god I procrastinated and never got around to getting it by the time the 3850 agp came out!

Whew! Close call!

Yeah, Jeff, that sounds great - I hear you and Sam loud and clear.

Prior to the fan balancing - I was getting those terrible high temps up to 99 on gpu, in this very hot weather we are now having:



I did all the fan balancing, and modded in the new bottom rear exhaust fan, per Sam's advice. All case fans not on the rear, are intake fans.

Bottom gpu section: The two 1600 rpm intakes got moved to the side, and the highest speed 1900 rpm became the new rear exhaust. Running the ATT renderer to stress graphics card at 99% and cpu at 100%, wow, that 1900 is really blowing out a lot of warm air!!

Here are the results, at stock clocks. Same weather, same trailer temperature, new exhaust fan and different fan configuration, reduced gpu temps by 7 degrees C.




Notice that the cpu temp is up 2 degrees to 73.

Now there is way more volume of warm air coming out of the new rear case bottom exhaust than from the top PSU exhaust. Now that I think about it, the top PSU is not putting out as much hot air as before. In other words, without that added bottom rear exhaust, it had only the little 80mm rear exhaust to help it vent the gpu heat. And my ceiling exhaust of before was worthless because I never felt any warm air at all coming out of that thing!

The result, as I said, is that my gpu temps dropped 7 degrees to the 90-92 range. And also, as I said, cpu temps are up slightly from 71 before, to 73 now. That makes sense I guess because I took the high speed fans out of the top. I think the P4 is safe at those temps. I can't overclock it at all or lose the sata drives, and the the bios cpu safety shut-off temp is 85.

After seeing the 7 degree reduction in temps, at stock clocks, I increased clocks to my optimum overclocked 702 gpu, and 936 memory, which gives me somewhat-fluid Left 4 Dead game play around 30 fps:



Wow! Temps climbed back up to 99-101 - HOTTER than boiling!!!

So I dropped the gpu clock to 695. That's only 1%, and still lets me get about 29-30 fps usually.




With that 1% reduction of gpu clock, temps are back down 6 degrees to 93-94, occasionally 95, compared to stock of 90-92.

I played around with reduced memory clock down to 918, then down to 900, (some settings I had created a few weeks ago when I thought maybe I was crashing because of memory) and I could see the fps on the ATT renderer go down - but gpu temps didn't change much - maybe 1 degree at most. I don't know what is happening with memory temps - I can't monitor that.

So when you say, Jeff, that the VF900 will cool the memory also - that sounds really good. Maybe that $50 investment will allow me to keep on chugging along with this p4 until end of year.

Tomorrow, gaming day, I will run overclocked at 695 gpu and 936 memory and see what happens. (I will stay away from the 702 gpu clock and those 101 temps.) I know you don't like gpu temps in the 90s, Jeff, neither do I, but Ati says its cards will run okay at those temps.

If I crash I'll drop memory clock to 900 - that should work - it worked before when I didn't have this great cooling I have now (of course we also didn't have this hot weather.) If that proves stable, I'll bring memory back up to 918, try that for a few hours, and hold it there if it doesn't crash.

If I get nothing but crashes - I don't anticipate that happening - then I'll turn on the A/C, lol.

Hey guys, I just looked up the Zalman - looks great - runs about $35-45. But I don't know if it's compatible - it says "most ati up to x1800." Right now I'm researching 3850 coolers. I can't get the arctic rev 2 because it's too wide at 8.5 inches - my whole case is only 7" wide - also it will bump into my new fans unless I put them on the outide of the case which I could do - so best bet would be to find something that's no wider than my card - no wider say than 5" wide, or 127mm.

I'll keep looking for 3850 cooling solutions. I found Ultra Perfomance VGA cooler at Tiger Direct and it IS compatible, but they don't have any dimensions - I'll google it some more. Any suggestions?

Edit:
Forget the Ultra - they don't even have any pictures on the company web site - but it looks like it is 8" wide - or another version is 6" wide. I don't think I'll mess with it.



Zalman VF1000
However, I came across the newer Zalman vf1000 - four heat pipes - copper everywhere - about $10 more than the vf900. The zalman site says it IS compatible with 3850 (I hope agp version doesn't cause problems) and dimensions are about 4" wide and 6" long, so it's compact enough for me. Anybody heard about this cooler? If the vf900 was good, this is probably better, does that sound right?

Zalman VF900-cu
Unlike the information on newegg, I found out that this cooler, the original two heat-pipe circular cooler, IS definitely compatible - again from the zalman site. You use the outermost holes for the 3850, the same holes you use for the vf1000 cooler.

Newegg has the VF1000 for $45, the VF900 for $35.

Ebay has one VF1000 starting at $10 with $10 shipping, auction ending in 7 days, and two VF900s, both with about $10 shipping, one starting at a buck, another starting at $5, both auctions ending in 4 days. If I lose both vf900 auctions, I'll try for the vf1000. Sounds like I'm probably going to end up with a VF900 - thanks for the tip Jeff (and Sam.)

Rich

 

Any cooler has to be firmly attached to work, Peltier or heatsink.
The VF900 is a handy cooler because it's very small and as yet is the only aftermarket cooler suitable for the HD4850X2 (you just buy two of them and you're good to go). The HD4870X2 however is smaller than the HD4850X2 can you believe, and so that doesn't work for it. However, the VF900 is not my ideal #1 choice for graphics cooling. See further down for details on that.
That CPU certainly is hot, if you're on 775 can you not potentially stretch a tower cooler? Most tower coolers have the option of buying a bracket to adjust them to fit the i7 socket, and you're already on 775 right?
That's a much better fan setup rich, two 1600s in, one 1900 out, that should see you with better temps - warm air coming out the back is a good sign - the more warm air comes out, the less warm air is inside.
The higher CPU temp will be due to the hot GPU air passing over the CPU before it leaves - that is something I usually live with, as my CPU should always have at least 15-20ºC of breathing room before dangerous temperatures. Right now you have about 3ºC so as I said, I think a new CPU cooler might be in order.
I tend to recommend never exceeding about 95ºC for a GPU, anything below that is usually fine. My X2s tend to run around 88-90ºC in games, the stock fan control is pretty much always dead on at that temperature, as the load increases so does the fan speed, but the temperature stays about there (perhaps alarming as the fans are up to 4000rpm in some titles on a hot day, but there's still another 1000rpm left before I'm out of fan power )
Overclocking graphics cards isn't like overclocking CPUs at all, the margins are much smaller and the temperature differential is MUCH higher, as you see. Modern GPUs do have a memory temperature probe if I remember rightly, I don't think it's the chips themselves it monitors though (because obviously, I have 32 of those and there's only 4 sensors), it's something to the side of the GPU.

The Accelero S1 rev. 2 is vast, and too big for a large number of cases. The VF900 will work but it might get a bit hot. The VF1000 is quite a capable cooler (remember the HD3850 AGP is a different layout to the HD3850 PCIe if I remember rightly).
However, my recommendation to you would be the cooler I used for my X1900XT:
http://www.thermalright.com/new_a_page/product_page/vga/hr03reva/product_vga_cooler_hr03reva.htm
This thing runs without a fan, and the X1900XT uses every bit as much power as the X1950XT if I recall. Slap a 92mm fan on it and your temps should be much better.

 

Just disconnected my 2 front 80mm's and am quite happy with the results the 120mm actually seems to be pulling some heat out whereas it used to pull cold air out somehow. The power supply fan is the noisiest thing at the moment (probably because its so cheap) so I either need a new PSU (I don't fancy forking out a fortune for a proper one) or a replacement 120mm fan now obviously I can't connect the replacement fan to the 2-pin connector in the PSU but I'll just run it through a gap in the unit to a motherboard 3-pin.

Anyways my temps with 80mm's still in but disconnected after stressing for 11 minutes:


hmm my screenshot looks really crappy and colourless

Something that helped my little bro's GPU temps was a crappy little PCI slot blower which impossibly lowered his albeit passively cooled Gefore 6200 AGP by about 20C although this isn't actually relevant as you've already mauled the slots and put a GIANT fan there instead.

 

Thats because you made it a jpeg - high compression jpegs make graphs look weak and colourless. I tend to prefer gifs for those, but they often corrupt colours like the buttons.

Slot fans are pretty useless on their own but they will still do something with no decent case fans and a passive heatsink, for obvious reasons.

For the PSU, perhaps a Corsair CX 400W? They're sub £40.

 

I've got a 650 watt at the moment!! Am I not at risk of running out of juice?

 

Good god, nowhere near it. Your PSU is, however, a Colors IT 650W, so it will max out at about 180W.

 

Sounds about right don't know how long before it blows up either (note its not if its WHEN).

After having a look I think I'll buy the Corsair HX450 because A. Its modular ooohhh B. IT has a 7 YEAR WARRANTY I'll be 23 before I need to replace it which is quite frankly ridiculous (just realized how young I am. Not cool).

 

i have a 550w colours IT, that wouldnt work on my x1800GTO (albeit with 90nm prescot P4) but did with a 3.2GHz C2D and 9800GT.