The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

id buy a dsi just for the remakes of gold and silver, hell they neeed to have a remake of crystal in any case

 

I bought my DS Lite just for Diamond/Pearl (though it was Platinum i ended up playing - got it about 4~5 months before it came out over here ^.^).

I've got an M3 DS Real, and honestly, that's the only thing that's made the DS worth it; there's just not enough games i like for it.

Pokemon, Professor Layton, Zelda and Chinatown Wars are good... Mariokart and Mario Bros. are both pretty bad, i don't see why people like them...

 

See I just don't have the patience for pokemon. I did when I was a kid but it seems to have disappeared since then probably caused by an insatiable need for speed! Caused by the games of the same name and lots lots others.

Breaking things is the sole reason I am able to fix things its generally speaking what I do.

I had someone’s respect??? How did that happen??

I recently ordered a DS pirate card for my granddad I think it was an R4 or an N5 but they appear to be the same thing anyway (he can pirate DS games yet he doesn’t know how to order something off the net-and the companies sue the consumer…)

I’ve never taken an interest to GTA and never played one. Although I’ve got San Andreas on the PS2 that I have no recollection of buying. Might kill some time…

 

The R4 is one of the worst flashcarts these days (even though it's still famous from the old days - it's not that it's bad, it's just most of the others are slightly more advanced / have better firmwares these days) - the N5 is even worse, it's a rip off of the R4 and i heard of it killing some people's DSs... Just thought i should warn you

 

Well whatever it is works... Although come to think of it the odd newer game tells you off for something to do with a dodgy savegame.

 

Hahaha.

Well you have my respect too for all that stuff you have - no wonder you never got into Left 4 Dead - and you have a really nice looking computer! And shaff has my respect for winning your contest - my god - what an eye!

And shokz, now that you have told us about all the prior GTA games that we never played ..........

......... with brighter colors, better missions, more sympathetic characters, thanks for ruining GTA4 for us, hahahaha.

WOOT

Edit: The zalman vf1000 came - am I stoked!



What a beautiful piece of equipment. Thanks jeff for recommending the vf900 - this is the upgraded version! All copper - highly polished base - a work of art! (It's so beautiful that maybe instead of installing it I'll frame it and hang it on the wall.)

It has the variable fan speed controller, but I think I'll just direct connect and run it at full speed. All the reviews say it's quiet and I'm using headphones anyway, and with the other fans going I'm not gonna hear it.

I bet I'll see a temp drop of at least 20 degrees.

Rich

 

My oldskool Ps2 from 2002 still works fine (it doesn't crash any less often than a 360).

 

Same here - I think my '02 PS2 has literally frozen on me about twice in all these years My PS3's already frozen about ten times (blame half of that on a glitch that was in the WipEout Fury expansion pack).

 

Ho ho!!! I finally beat Mercy on Expert! All the bots escaped. Well...at least the last chapter anyway LOL! I've been trying it for quite some time, and it may have just been luck. Now i'll have to try doing the whole campaign on expert level.

 

Oh my days this is getting on my nerves... I'm trying to back everything up onto an 80GB drive before 64-bit 7 RC downloads. Now I know some of you guys already run 64-bit but what I wanted to know was what anti-virus are you running?? I currently use Avira but there's no 64-bit version (that's free at least) does it make any difference whether I keep running that even though it's only 64-bit? When I temporarily fiddled with XP Pro 64-bit a while back I used Avast but it go on my nerves. A final point is that I damn right refuse to pay for AV.

 

Im running AVG on X64 windows 7RC. But you know, I run 32 and 64 bit applications seamlessly. What I mean is there is rarely a problem. Avg runs just fine. No probs what so ever

 

Well guys...I don't think I'll be playing Left 4 Dead for a while LOL! I discovered a cheat for the Annihilator(Chopper)! Jumping out at high altitudes is proving to be pretty entertaining. For some reason Nico came into contact with the propeller blades at one point while screaming. IT SILENCED HIM LOL! Then he proceeded to tumble through the air smacking buildings, etc. Wish I had fraps running at the time!!!

 

I keep meaning to get GTA IV because every time I see vids/screens of it it looks nothing other then kickass fun. It'll have to wait till I buy a 360 pad because I just remembered there's no decent drivers for the PS3 pad on x64 :-(

 

Xpadder?

 

Xpadder isn't drivers it just assigns controller buttons/axis's to keyboard keys, mouse clicks and mouse movement. Without the drivers in the first place the computer recognises the PS3 pad but doesn't detect any input from it. So several people have made their own drivers (some of which require a piece software that more often then not cripples all USB) but no-one has ever bothered to do the same for x64.

BIG FAT EDIT: SOMEONE HAS RELEASED X64 DRIVERS SINCE I LAST LOOKED

 

Hey sam,
Im not sure if i've asked before. Your one of the only people I know running a large(2560W) LCD monitor. Do you watch dvds on that badboy? LOL! And what media player do you find to upscale DVD's the best? Cause i've found that there's at least a small difference from one player to the next. Currently, I find either XBMC or Nero Showtime (9) to be the best. Dvd shrink being the worst. Oddly, xp displayed shrink ok. But on windows 7, it almost looks grainy!!!

 

Holy Cr*p, Kevin, you beat it on expert with bots?? (Beautiful screen shot by the way, hahaha.) That's like swimming the English Channel. That is HARD! What strategy did you use - has to be defending around the ammo - has to be. Anything else wouldn't work with bots. And you mean to tell me you and the bots beat two tanks?

I'm flabbergasted!! Good job! When are you coming on-line bro?

Speaking of Left 4 Dead, I finally got that beautiful zalman vf-1000 cooler installed on my 3850. Wow, is that thing heavy with all that copper! I just finished tightening up the nuts about 10 minutes ago - I'm going to let it sit upright for a day or two so the memory sinks hopefully don't fall off later.

I used arctic silver 5 instead of the zalman thermal paste - the zalman probably would have been fine, but I'm convinced arctic silver is the best from everything I've read. That's what you use, right Jeff? I was super careful not to use too much because I know it's conductive - I didn't want it to gob down on the lower part of the gpu where several solder points are sprinkled on the chip.

I took out my raid 0 and went back to the ide - and if I run out of room on the 160 gig - only 40 gigs left - I have a 500 gig pata sitting on the shelf. The sata raid wouldn't let me tweak my fsb at all - I lost the sata controller when I tried. Plus I was having a little bit of unusual stuttering - the ms-7103 board offers only the original low speed sata, so I'm probably wasting those sata drives on this mobo. I did notice that my level loading is back up to slow - but I didn't have the stuttering. (Or it could have been the agp aperture - I had moved it to 128mb - and then I read where a girl had stuttering on a racing game when she did that, and dropping back to 64mb solved the problem - which is what I did, so maybe it was that.) I'll save the sata drives with 1.2 terabytes for the new build, if and when, haha.

I overclocked my p4 by the most msi-7103 would let me - 5%, lol, based on the fact that in actual play mode, the cpu never got above 68 degrees on a very hot day, so I think I have a little headroom under the 75 degrees ceiling that Sam was talking about - but I do have the speedfan temp settings now as part of my on-screen display so I can watch the cpu temperature. The fsb is now 210 instead of 200, so core multiple of 16 gives me 3.33 ghz versus 3.2 - maybe another 1-2 fps.

Now that estuansis got me to invest $43 in this zalman cooler, and in view of all the customized ventilation and filters all the way around, I am thinking of putting maybe a last $100 into this rig to carry me for the last 6 months until I finally start the new build with an all-new case - maybe the spedo out in the garage - or maybe a lian-li like shaff. The last mods - adding filters to all intakes, outside easy-to-clean filter for kama bay, then "mauling" my case - was it Keith who said that? - to put in the big 1900 rpm exhaust fan - has turned this case into my little p4 hobby center - I will be keeping this machine as a general business computer and occasional light gaming rig for anybody to use out in the sunroom. That will make my cad cam brother Joe happy - he drops by occasionally and we go to the movies - and he can't stand how slow the 400mhz rig is that's in the sunroom right now, when he looks up movie times on Fandango.

I know P4s are cheap right now - nobody wants them - so I checked and the board will support the 670. I could pick up a 3.8 P4 670 dual core hyperthreading (I disable HT for gaming) with 2mb of L2 cache for only about $80 (I have only 1mb L2 cache right now) and a cpu cooler for about $20, and with my slight overclock fsb, core multiple of 19x would put me at basically 4.0 ghz, which is 20% faster than I am now - that and double the L2 cache (makes a big difference - I have a 1.6 ghz Dell 610 pentium M laptop with 2mb L2 cache and on certain things - high def media player movie trailers for example - it outperforms my p4) might be good for maybe 5-7 fps more, which would keep me in the low to mid 30s most of the time and keep everything pretty smooth (I'm not running at 2560x1600.)

I need every little bit of cpu muscle I can get. Plus going through my bios - I tweaked agp voltage a hair and memory voltage a hair - and dropped vram share from max of 132mb to min of 16mb, something like that - my theory being that with 512mb on the 3850 I have enough texture memory for now at 1920x1200, and with only 1 gig system ram, let my xp have all the ram it can because it could help the cpu bottleneck - at least that's my theory.

Anyway, it ran Left 4 Dead for several hours pretty smooth last night like that.

We helped a buddy, Boombizzle, now known as Boob (who spends the other half of his time on Counter Strike - maybe I'll start joining him - my p4 can handle that) get the last leg of What are You Trying to Prove - he was missing only Blood Harvest. Boob messaged me asking if I wanted to do pistols only on easy - but I messaged back that we had a good team together and we would take him all the way on Blood Harvest. I asked the guys to agree that if Boob got killed in the finale we would all let the zombies kill us too, but we didn't have to resort to that. I got killed by the last tank, but stayed on the mic "Get Boob on the truck" and Killa said "You jump down first, Boob, we'll cover."

"What are you trying to prove" rolled across the credits and now Boob is happy. Then, because the other guy, I think Pit Bull, had told me about it, I went to L4dmods and tried Heaven can Wait in expert with bots - dropped back to normal finally to make a little headway - I did the first two chapters but finally quit - I am seriously lagging down to fps only in the teens - it's not optimized like the regular L4D and I don't want to mess with my settings. So large parts of the mod play like sh*t on my system. I hope L4D2 is optimized as well, if I still don't have the new build by then, (probably won't) and I hope next month's Crash plays okay.

Omega you crack me up! Great screens of GTA4! I can't even think about running that (even though I own it) on my p4 - I'll be getting into that in about 6-8 months. However I picked up San Andreas - I wonder if that will run - Shokz are you around? I think San Andreas is much older from the time when p4s ruled, lol. Besides Shokz says it's prettier - so maybe I'll try that for a while.

Rich

 

San andreas is MUCH lighter compared to GTA IV. Your system should run it. I had a 1.4 athlon with a 6200 Nvidia try to run it. It was close, but not quite.
Yes, all the bots including myself escaped. But as I said, I could have got lucky LOL! Basically, I went in in a KILLER Mode(extremely confident) LOL! You know that sensation when you've got an incredible adrenaline rush, and your focus level is top notch? And the bots just seemed to match my skill level. I did however also have this incredible urge to protect the bots more so than normal. For instance, I'll jump in front of the horde to protect them, with the melee attack.

 

Melee with the horde, me too.

I've been also trying some extra melee just lately - like crashing into a bunch of zombies stomping on a disabled team-mate, rather than taking a few extra seconds and shooting them. However, I have noticed that you can easily pick up some health damage if the team-mate is firing wildly, as is likely, trying to rid himself of the stompers.

But I know what you mean - you get these certain feelings of confidence from time to time and just get mad and feel like bashing the zombies!

Anyway nice job, Kevin. I always thought on expert it was impossible to beat a finale with a team of bots - but you just proved me wrong! What defense did you use - defend around ammo - top of roof? Just curious.

Regarding San Andreas - thanks, I might load it in a month or so. I think Shokz said that it had pretty colors, and didn't he also talk about some of the missions - and isn't there a hang glider or something, lol?

Hey, regarding cpus, I just had an amazing thought! Sam I really need your help with this one. On the MSI-7103 cpu compatibility chart, some of the cpus were listed as being 64 bit, which was confusing to me because I thought all P4s were 32 bit. My thinking was that a 64 bit architecture is desirable, because it can process 8 bytes at a time even if running a 32 bit operating system. But in doing some more reading, I think that was an oversimplification, and maybe I am just wrong about that.

Anyway, the processor I have now is a model 540, or 541. But the processor I am looking at for $80 is a 3.8 ghz model 670 - double the L2 cache at 2mb - and according to the following article, is a true 64-bit processor.

So my question, Sam - does that buy me extra performance beyond the higher speed and extra cache - the actual architecture being 64 bit - or does it not buy me anything? I'm speaking strictly for gaming on my XP Professional 32-bit operating system.

Here's the article from March 2005:

Rich

 

LOL! I was defending around the ammo (in the staircase mostly). But the tank caused me to come out more than once. Mmmm, i was lucky enough to keep spotting the damn smoker too. That smoker can really screw things up!!! If you can keep your eye on the smoker, and the hunter, you have a good shot. And I try to keep the tank angry at me too LOL!