The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Yeah, I've seen as high as about 45-50 with the 8800. Notably in "Relic" when you enter the tunnel into the dome.

 

A side effect of trying to run the game as well as I can really. If I used a lower resolution and didn't bother trying to optimise the frame rate, I would see higher peaks I'm sure, but why leave it there?

 

Crysis seriously looks like crap out of native res. That's the main reason I'm getting the 4870. I get better visuals at native res on my 17" than I do with 1680 res on my 24".

 

Yeah, you will. Any non-native res game looks yuck IMO, which is why having 2560 is such a bummer...
Centred timings help a lot, but you need AA to avoid bigger jaggies.

 

Well, some games look fine out of native res. CoD4 notably. Though I still use AA when I can.

 

Some are affected worse than others, but in COD4 it's still noticeable.

 

Hey you guys were kinding of jumping on TheftAuto for his 1200 watt PSU. In his opinion he has future-proofed himself.

But I heard some words to the effect that he's using more power than he needs right now, so he's wasting energy. Now, is that true? Do power supplies use a lot of energy, when they are idling?

He's got 1200 watts - that's potential power - and hopefully not just peak power but continuous power. But if he is only pulling 600 watts right now - are any of us saying that he's pulling more energy than that because of the potential power of his unit? I don't think PSUs work that way, do they?

Correct me if I am wrong, but he's got 1200 watts potential power. If his current rig requires 600 watts, then I believe he isn't drawing down any more power from his 115v wall outlet than if he had a 650 watt power supply. Am I right on this - or not?

 

No, his PSU wont use 1200W at all times. It will only use as much as his PC needs.

 

That's correct, but needing more than 1KW is pretty damn hard.

 

It's not so hard if you apply capacitor aging.

Look at the power draw on the bottom. In all fairness to TheftAuto - his 1200 watts is beginning to make a lot of sense.

The bottom draw, 752 watts, is two of Sam's current card, the 4870x2. At the resolutions that Sam loves, 2560x1600, I see Sam with two of those cards one day, (Jeez, at the speed Sam upgrades - maybe next week) or something just as powerful.

With 1000 watts headroom, you only have 248 watts left for: hard drives, cpu, fans, etc. Are you guys all comfortable with only that much headroom?

Capacitor aging:

They say that you should apply a 10% to 20% reduction in power output after 1 year, for basic capacitor aging. Let's use 15%. Capacitor aging of 15% takes a 1200 watt PSU down to 1020. It takes a 1000 watt PSU down to 850. It takes your headroom, from 248 down to 98 watts for everything other than the graphics card. How comfortable is everybody now??

They ran all this with the PCP&C 750, although they had the 1200 watts available to run the GTX280 SLIx3.

TheftAuto's logic isn't looking too shabby to me. If we take Sam's idea about 1000 watts, and apply capacitor aging, that takes us to 1200 watts, and that makes TheftAuto the new bright kid in town!!

 

Well, I still like being right!

 

Haha no - I can't fit two 4870X2s, as I can't fit a 4870X2 in my top PCIe slot due to my southbridge cooler. Besides, I'd have crossfired my 4870X2 and normal 4870 if I had the PSU to do so, but I don't...

You raise a very good point about capacitor aging actually, I hadn't considered that.

 

Actually, that is where the efficiency comes in. If my pc only needs 600W atm, then thats 87% of the power that my PSU will using. If my PC requires the full 1200W, then it will be at 100% efficiency. It actually states 87%+, so lots of the time its better than 87% efficiency, with 87% being the minimum.

 

No, it's 87%, meaning that it typically makes 87, maybe 88. I would be very surprised if it can ever go above 90. The electronics of PSUs just don't work that well for high powered units.

Efficiency is not how much of its rated output the PSU can produce, it's how much more power it's putting out that it requires from the mains - i.e. a 1000W PSU that's 85% efficient will not max out at 850W, it will max out at 1000W, but use 1176W from the mains to do so. A more efficient PSU will still output the same amount in the PC, but use less mains current to do so, and therefore save electricity. It's worth noting that PSUs are typically 2% or so more efficient in the UK than the US due to the higher voltage.

 

I think we are both a bit wrong on this one
"What is efficiency in a power supply? It is defined as the power loss in AC-to-DC conversion, expressed as a percentage of total AC input power. For example, a power supply that requires 100W AC input to produce 70W DC output has an efficiency of 70%. In this example, 30W is lost as heat within the PSU. A power supply that requires 100W AC input to produce 80W DC output has an efficiency of 80%. 20W is lost as heat. The 10W difference in these examples seems trivial. However, at higher output levels, differences in efficiency becomes quite significant in terms of how much energy is lost as heat"

I still think that 87%+ efficient means that 87%+_ is the minimum, it might be what it's usually at too though, but I think it's the minimum, or else the plus just wouldn't make sense.

 

That's what the PSU implies, yes. However, I know of no current PSU that manages more than 87-88% in the 400W+ sector, and that's UK electricity too, US voltage has about a 2% hit on efficiency.

 

Now wait a second. You take our idea for an auto, and you forget which side we put the steering wheel on, you mispronounce the letter Z, you add an extra i to aluminum, you get baseball all wrong, and you're charging us a 2% electricity premium to live in the good old US of A?

Are you limies still taxing us after all these 200 years?

"Throw the tea overboard!"

 

Lol I think you're a bit late to the party for that one Rich!

 

I don't care about anything else, but don't you talk about Cricket! lol

 

Lol I walked past the sign at chelmsford station today that read 'Welcome to chelmsford - home of the essex county cricket club' and thought of you... lmao