The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

It's been kind of a while but I had installed the hacked drivers and they worked great. But yesterday I REALLY needed to record something and of course, no stereo mix or WhatUhear.

I looked on creative and downloaded some VERY old drivers and they had WhatUhear on them. It works great and my battlefield doesn't crash anymore.

 

anyone seen the new asus concept? an x58 mobo with lucid and ONBOARD 5770!

 

5770 according to some, 5450 according to others. 5770 would be neat, 5450 seems relatively pointless, but more likely.
Supposedly, Asus have managed to turn Lucid from a complete failure into a flawless success, but NDAs prevent the details from coming out just yet. I'm intrigued, but to say I'm extremely sceptical is an understatement.

 

LOL! Flawless? I'd be skeptical too

 

Well, the 4GB HD5970 arrived, DOA. Since there are no more being produced, the only way I'd get another is send it back to Hong Kong for repair, or for them to produce another from the factory. Given that'd see me minus the £840 I paid and no card to show for it for up to 6 months, I think I'll pass. So that therefore means plan B - get two 5870 Eyefinity6 cards. Slightly cheaper, but no nice cooler (not unless I replace it manually).
Also means I'll need a displayport to DVI adapter for my second monitor, hopefully the cards are provided with one.

 

Wow. That sucks. My condolences. I guess that's the price we pay for cutting edge technology. Sometimes not all the bugs are worked out, or a design needs to be revised to be more solid/forgiving

What do you think is wrong with it?

 

There's a short in the power circuitry. It smells baaaaad!
Nowt to do with cutting edge technology really, Sapphire just haven't bothered to QC the card, despite how expensive and exclusive it is. Not impressed.
Still, I have to say, DOA percentage with Sapphire does seem higher than most brands. The ones that do work usually last, but this isn't my first DOA Sapphire card, and I know a few people who have had similar grief.

 

does it actualyl work though? or just smell bad and you turned it off?

 

Yah, sapphires reviews have always been less than the average manufacturer. I've noticed that for a while now. But the ones that do well, do get good reviews
It is a shame about quality control sometimes. They probably hired a bunch of children, just like everybody else...

 

It prevents the system from POSTing (both of them) and two red LEDs remain lit. I'd consider that faulty, me

 

isit getting enough juice?

 

I'm sure the Zalman would push out enough. If only just to post the system. I've had a faulty sound card behave similarly. The board wouldn't allow the system to post. It gave me an error code, than shut down.

 

One 5970 vs two 4870X2s, I'm pretty sure it is. The 8-pin connectors are on separate rails, and besides, it's not as if it's shutting down under load, this is at idle. My PSU can handle the OCCT GPU test, so half as many GPUs in the BIOS should be no issue at all Pretty sure one of the VRMs is just dead.

 

Interesting point - I didn't realize that!

Me too!

Kevin - Lucid is more the kind of thing you were expecting in regard to the combining of two or more gpus - supposedly lucid would manage the process of load balancing among the gpus - and the game would just see one graphics card, if I remember correctly.

That is how the very first dual graphics card that was ever developed worked - going back to the gpu pioneer 3dfx in its last days at the end of the 20th century, before nvidia drove them out of existence. They put two gpus on a single card, splitting the screen vertically in half - and the game software never knew there were two gpus.

(I guess that kind of simplistic scheme is kind of impossible due to today's complexity of images - what's in the foreground blocking something in the background? - how is light bouncing from the upper edge and illuminating something down below? ... etc etc. I guess today's final image is far trickier to compute than in the late '90s when 3dfx was able to just split the screen in half.)

Anyway - Lucid was talking some great stuff - but as much as I'd like to see it all work (and some super great ideas have come out of Israel like the whole intel core two duo architecture) - it all sounded way too good to be true.

Good work andmill on retrofitting those old soundblaster drivers and fixing everything - that's why I keep all old reliable drivers around and try to comment on what was working good - sometimes the new stuff ends up messing everything up!

Sorry to hear about the DOA Sam - I didn't realize you'd actually decided to invest in one of those guys. Sounds like you have ruled out PSU - you could always hit it with a hammer and see if that helped Or let Shaff's brother have a look at it

Second monitor - what do you have in mind, Sam?

Rich

 

If I remember rightly, 3dfx SLI still used drivers like nvidia's system. Maybe I'm wrong about that though.

As for the second monitor, i've had a 20" 1680x1050 Samsung for over a year now, that I've been using as a secondary display.

 

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2010/06/07/crazy-new-graphics-cards-from-powercolor/1

wow some really goodinnovations from powercolor.

a half height 5770, thats alot of power in a small space!

a 5770 with a built in NIC, innovative, but WTF comes to mind.

a 5770 with lucid buitl in, this is VERY intresting, if they have it working, you could just save your old GPU and use it with the 5770.

anda 12 display 4GB 5970, band in 2 of them and 24 displays FTW.

 

Published elsewhere a few days back, forget where.
The Killer NIC card is a con, simply because Killer NIC is a con. It has no functional purpose, it may as well be a scam.
The Lucid integration is interesting, assuming that Lucid actually works now. I've still yet to read a single article that says so.
The 12-display 5970 is interesting, but 12 displays aren't really for gamers, it's more suited to workstations, where you would normally use something a lot less powerful and expensive. The half height card is by far the best of these products. It's just a shame they're all from Powercolor and not a company I trust a bit more.

 

Has powercolor wronged you in the past sam Sorry, had to ask.

I suppose every manufacturer has to start somewhere. I've seen their components on newegg a few times. They've struck me as a low/mid level trustworthy manufacturer. But this new product does sound interesting. And if it works, they're the first to do it. Which could mean good things for them, on the business front

 

Powercolor's main shortfall is that they make most of their PCBs custom. Not that this is bad, but their designs usually suck and lead to dead/faulty cards. If they've improved their design department, there is no reason not to buy a Powercolor. Just be warned that their past is questionable. Especially be careful with SFF video cards. They have to cut corners somewhere to make it all fit :S

 

i have only bought reference stuff of theirs, perfectly fine for me.

sapphire 3rd party is fine for me aswell, as is palit and XFX.