The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

i found what it was and it is that scan computer got me on three site they said that board that i got witch P5E3 Premium did sli but infact it is the X48 chipset and it only dose crossfire ha ha. partly my fault but more their fualt because they said that it did indeed do SLI and dosnt. lol so will be going back to scan tomorrow and will be ripping somones head off ha ha. another thing is that the board has also gone missing from there web site now witch i think i might of got the last one in. owell not the end of the world. was looking forwards to finding out how ddr3 proformed not tonite ha ha. thanks for all the help!!!!


EDIT: will do my sig just for you sam!

EDIT SECOND TTIME ROUND: done my sig for sam ha ha

 

Haha. Kevin, you're a genius. First off, I never ever saw that computer anywhere in the game. So right away you're ahead about a mile. I blew my Internet Explorer browser up to 400% and could just read the Beefy Computer on the side - very nice.

Now, where is that goddamm computer??? I'm gonna guess Dead Air - 4th chapter, in the suite of offices. Am I right?

(I also see you were out of shotgun rounds - you like to go around blasting stuff don't you, lol!)

Sam - speaking of blasting stuff. You have actually shot the side panels off of in-game computers, to expose the inner workings! Haha. That's hysterical! Watch - that's the next thing Kevin will do.

Nice picture, Keith. Yes, definitely a wireless mouse! Hahaha. By the way, all day Wednesday I was on my new wireless that Logitech sent me to replace the defective "random fire" v220 - bottom usb slot just for good luck - and it worked flawlessly!

Hey Nav, thanks for faking Sam out with that out of date sig, lol. Man - they sold you a non-sli board - well those bums sure faked you out - they better swap it out for you!

Wow, Sam, your fps rate explanation was highly technical - but I think I followed it reasonably well. Very interesting. I also never run vertical sync. I recall that the Ati Tray tools advanced advice does not recommend it - I may also have tried it once without good results.

Your interesting discussion ties in with what I have been seeing from some of the new HDTVs that claim improved quality of motion from double the refresh rates - especially on sports. I think Samsung is pushing double the refresh rate - and now from your discussion I will certainly give that feature added consideration on my next HDTV purchase - Jeff - are you listening?

Getting back to gameplay, I guess I have to fall back on the "feel" of the game - when people say "it feels laggy" and you get the sense of the game running a little behind your mouse movements. From that standpoint - I guess I'm not really talking about movement - well yes I am, but not just the visual look of the game.

I'm talking about the game lagging a bit behind my mouse movement. So what kind of lag is that? That's basically slow processing - right?

My magic Catalyst Auto-tune recommended settings of 702/936 result in reasonably smooth gameplay, largely absent that "feel" of lagginess. Two days ago, having been quite scared of the 101 stress test temps - even with the new exhaust - I dropped to 695/936 - which had resulted in 6 degree cooler gpu temps that never exceeded 95 degrees on the stress test.

Real world, running Left 4 Dead all day Wednesday, my gpu temp was 77-78, and my cpu temp was 67-68.

But I still crashed once, within the first two hours, so I dropped vram clock to 918, and no more crashes.

So my new stable clocks seem to be 695/918.

I can "feel" the difference, however, from not being at 702/936. It's a very subtle difference of slightly more action spots where the game gets a tiny bit laggy.

So, if I am following you, you're saying that 702/936, even with low temps from a new added cooler, might be inherently unstable - as it may be more of a voltage issue. I assure you I won't mess with voltages.

I used to run at much higher clocks - slightly higher memory of 945, but quite a bit higher gpu clocks of 725, and even up to 745 if I recall. Those clocks had proven to be stable under the Ati Tray Tool testing and had not produced any artifacts on the renderer. But when I ran those higher clocks playing Call of Duty 4 multiplayer on my 1440x900 19" screen, occasionally after several hours, I would crash.

Finally several months ago, I investigated Catalyst and auto-tune and was surprised by two things:

1. I noticed that Catalyst wouldn't even let me set a gpu clock above 720 - conservative compared to what I had been running, although their recommended max memory clock of 936 was pretty close to the 945 I had been running. 2. I was surprised that the max recommended auto-tune gpu clock was "only" 702.

So I guess my conclusion is: at one time I was running - for hours at a time - clocks quite a bit higher than 702 - I was driving fewer pixels however. But (you tell me) possibly that says it isn't a voltage issue. I don't know.

So, I am going to pick up one of the ebay coolers, either the vf900 or vf1000 (which I know without a doubt will fit in my narrow case) and see if I can get back to my auto-tune recommended clocks of 702/936.

Rich

 

Death toll. Its in the upstairs area, just before lowering the forklift. I was playing advanced. I do tend to use a lot of shotgun shells LOL!

 

Haha you guys missed something. When you shoot the PCs you can see their innards. Every shootable PC in the game has an ATi card and I've even found one with Crossfire

 

I have too actually, I forget where I found it

 

LOL jeff. It seems like I did see the inner workings at one time, but I might simply be imagining it LOL! I will sure be looking closer at things now LOL!

 

Haha well you know me. I'm very detail oriented. It's all the cool little stuff like that that draws me into a game. Kinda like rainbows and water refraction in Crysis. Extra attention to detail is always a bonus in any game.

 

navskin: As sad as it is you got a board that won't do SLI, you got a much better board for it. Sli boards for 775 are crap, universally dire. If I were you I'd sell the second card and keep the board.
Rich: Running out of shotgun rounds is too easily done
I saw a 100Hz TV in person for the first time last month, it was absolutely incredible, it's on my 'must have specs' list when buying a new Tv.



Jeff: Exactly, I like little details like that too - always makes me feel more immersed in a game.

 

well i am stick with i got just because it ant good enuff for you sam dosent mean that it ant good enuff for me. any i got an ASUS Extreme Striker 2 motherboard now. And whats wrong with socket 775 i am runnning 6 gigs of ddr3 1600mhz witch ant to bad i think. gonna be running the 2 x 260 in sli will do banchmarks and post later do you think that the ddr3 will help my pc compared to ddr2?

 

hoenstly, DDR3 is not any help in gaming, but is with benchmarking. not neccassarily 3dmark, but overlclockers benches.

also good luck with the build, each to their own, what ever works for you, be happy with it.

i personally cant use other boards than ASUS' ROG series, after beign spolit by the BIOS, sam cant use any asus baords after they all failed on him, etc etc etc, so what ever works for you, be happy, dont let anyone tell you otherwise lol, (unless u choose a crap PSU, then we will bite your head off )

my mate in the UAE has a 780i baord, with tri sli GTX 260s and a 4.1 GHZ Q9550. has it for abotu 4 months now, no problems, so obviously not every nvidia board is bad

 

double post, mods please kill

 

well i ant getting qny luck it lookl ike that this new board of mine has a bad bios going to try updating it now and see it that fixes the problem that i am having with the lans both of them. it say that i have a bad lan cable tryed 3 diffrent cables tho.

 

well i ant getting qny luck it lookl ike that this new board of mine has a bad bios going to try updating it now and see it that fixes the problem that i am having with the lans both of them. it say that i have a bad lan cable tryed 3 diffrent cables tho.

 

It's a striker, of course it's faulty, all strikers are - hence why I told you not to change it. (For reference the total failure point for nvidia chipsets is typically 9-12 months, 4 is too early to say).
You basically have three options:

1. Replace the motherboard every few weeks to every few months
2. Sell the 260s and buy a GTX295 SinglePCB, and get an Intel chipset board
3. Sell the Core 2 Quad and invest in an i7 so you can use SLI with an intel chipset.

The most practical of these is probably option 2.

 

Sam thanks for the sound peace of advice but i fixed it the reflash did the job fine. So i have installed windows vista x64 all up and running with sp2, and it is running like SH** off a shovel. the rog board is so good theres to many options in the bios from me to choose dont know what i will do next. ha ha asus has pulled one from nowhere with this one. Dose anyone know of anygame that run in native x64 because all the games i have installed are running in 32 bit and i want to see if there is an advatage to x64 like a little bit of an experiment.

 

Try Crysis. It has a 64 bit mode and it USES it. Your main limit on 64 bit is going to be your RAM. 64 bit really basically means you can use more RAM.

 

Hey guys, speaking of 64 bit as in estuansis and nav, can you guys help me out? It's a little off topic but I'm helping my brother, Joe, who is wondering what his Vista Cad/Cam bottleneck is.

He dropped by last night and told me he might be thinking about building his own PC from scratch.

He does Cad/Cam for a giant construction company - he actually is a carpenter (drywall guy) but has a degree in math from UCLA and kind of talked his way into the office out of the "field" and then picked up the cad stuff on his own - he's a Mac guy from way back but is getting into PCs 'cause all the software they use is PC-based.

Anyway, he just picked up a $1700 Vista machine from Fry's - a quad 2.66 Phenom, 8 gigs ram, and a 3650 with 512mb vram, plus 750gig sata drive, and 22" monitor, because the hardware his company gave him to learn this stuff and crank out the blueprints for the field, is too slow.

So - here's the problem:

He dropped by last night and I said "How's the new cad/cam stuff?" He said, "I'm learning like crazy - I just discovered this paper space setting that gives you the printout view, and I can add the company logo et al to all the stuff - BUT I THINK I HAVE A VIDEO CARD BOTTLENECK."

I asked about his equipment, and if he had phenom 1, or 2. He said probably only phenom 1 - so he started asking me about the i7 920, and I told him about the d0 stepping.


BOTTLENECK

Anyway, he is running vista, has 8 gigs ram, and as he adds and adds to a drawing, he watches the [task manager?] increase ram usage to 3.7, 3.8 - and he knows a "refresh" is going to occur, where the cad/cam program redraws the entire screen. When that starts, he can go get a cup of coffee - it takes 2 minutes, and is driving him nuts.

1. He says it can't be cpu - because the [task manager? - I don't know vista] shows only 29% cpu usage

2. He says it can't be memory, because [it] shows not using over 4 gigs and he has 8 gigs of ram (but is vista limited to not more than 4 gigs per task - like xp can't handle more than 2 gigs per task?)

3. So he says it's his video card.

I said "No, your video card can't be the problem on that two minute refresh. It's your processing power."

But neither of us can figure out why the cpu usage would only be 29%, if the problem is that his phenom is too slow.

Another thing it sounded like to me was the hard drive access - I told him that he is going to be using paging file space no matter how much ram he has, if vista is like xp. Then we started wondering about Vista's use of ram, because he has never seen the system use over 4 gigs. In terms of disk access, he said "Well, maybe that Raid0 you were talking about, Rich, would help me out."

I am trying to google for some idea as to what kind of a PC is best suited for cad/cam, and what might be his bottleneck - any help you guys can give, Sam, Jeff, Shaff, Kevin, Nav, Keith would be much appreciated.

Rich

 

A 2.66Ghz Phenom sounds like a 9950, which will be slow as a dog. A core 2 quad will be a much better bet, an i7 even better. I can't believe he paid $1700 for such an outdated machine.
29% CPU usage suggests the application is single threaded, in which case that CPU will be very slow indeed.
GPUZ can tell you the GPU usage.

 

cad/cam is 3d modleing right?

IICR the best for that would be nvidias quadro gfx cards.

an i7 will be VERY VERY helpfull. liek winrar, it doesnt show 100% usage on my dual core, but its still slower vs my 3.91GHz Q9550.

 

A quadrofx or firegl card would be much better suited, IF the program he's using supports them.