The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

My i5 runs at 4116 24/7, same as my 3dmark setting. The voltage needed to do it is so low, and it's so stable, there's no reason to lower it.

I've used my 1600 dpi Razer for nearly 4 years, have got used to the sensitivity, but how it comes out depends on the game.
As far as I'm aware, there is no such thing as an HD3830. As for overclocking, the 3850 isn't that weak in Left 4 Dead, you should be able to play it fine without.

 

IICR the 3830 was a chinese only GPU.

 

Hey guys, man it's been a long time since i've come on here...

Just thought i'd chime in on the DVI to HDMI thing - graphics cards should come with an internal SPDIF connector that you connect from the motherboard audio to the graphics card and it should then output sound via the DVI ports so you can use a DVI to HDMI adapter properly (well, at least, that's how i got my GTX260 outputting audio to my TV, since it just has two DVI ports), maybe it only works with newer cards, i don't know.

 

Hmm, I've seen a few china-only cards like the 4860, will have to look it up when i'm back at my PC.
As for the SPDIF, the HDMI audio goes straight out the DVI to HDMI dongle I use into the TV.

 

It basically works well for all situations. I keep it at 2000DPI at all times which works for everything from mid range shootouts to short range knife fights. I only turn down the DPI to 800 when I am using the sniper rifles which is not very often.

I was previously on my 1800DPI Logitech MX518 for 3 or 4 years and my 1600DPI Razer Krait as my secondary for about the same time. Both are still nearly like new and both see regular use. The Krait collects a little dust maybe but it's perfect for LANs.

Sorry to be your buzzkill here. But your performance issues are most definitely your CPU. If you upgraded even to the slowest dual core available today, your FPS would easily double in every game, even without overclocking. Like a 1.8GHz Celeron Dual Core at bare stock settings is easily twice as fast as that 3.8GHz Pentium 4. The Pentium 4 is like 8 or 9 years old now and was never even that fast when it came out. The HD3850, even when new, would have been paired with a high clock AMD64 X2 or a Core 2 Duo. That Pentium 4 is choking it down so bad it's not even funny. Stop overclocking it because you're going to destroy it, cooler or not. The only way you're going to have any sort of substantial performance improvement is with a new CPU.

To make my point, Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 Should be running many many times faster than it currently does on your rig. But your CPU is what is keeping it at such a low FPS. You've simply hit the CPU cap for the game. It won't go any faster without a new CPU. This has such an effect I'd say your GPU overclocking was only a placebo.

I wouldn't be so blunt about it if I didn't think it was true...

 

Eh...I'm just not into playing online. At least with games like that. Perhaps If I got really good, and knew the game well enough though. I'm highly self conscious. I can't help but wonder what people think of me 90% of the day. Not a way to live I know

 

And yeah I'm with Jeff, Rich, running that 3850 into the ground will do you no favours if you end up having to replace it before you bother buying an upgrade for the rest of the system.
As an example:
Left 4 Dead 2, max graphical settings
Q9550 at 3400mhz: 55-240fps
i5 750 at 4116mhz: 80-350fps

Now, the Q9550 is a good 70-80% faster than your P4 per-core, and there's 4 of them, and look at the difference upgrading to the i5 achieved

 

I find DPI really depends on how you use the mouse. Back when I was playing BC2 I was sniping successfully at around 5600dpi, although it takes a real toll on your wrist. I managed to give myself carpel tunnel inside two weeks

 

As far as I'm aware, no mouse has such a dpi. Are you not thinking of something else?

 

http://overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-002-HS

:O

sam the razer mamba has that

 

Lol, well excluding needless £100 mice then
Seriously though, what a farse. I can't imagine a situation where more precision is required than my 1600dpi Diamondback offers.

Cheap HD5870. As crazy as it sounds though, for a short-medium term upgrade I'd probaby sooner take this:
http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials...R5+PCI-Express+Graphics+Card+?productId=40734
Non-reference designs do seem a bit of risk, and the reference designs are more trustworthy. Where you lose out with a raw OEM card of course is nothing beyond a 1 year retail warranty, so for longer term the HIS is a better option.

I'd want a user opinion on that cooler before I parted with the cash though, aftermarket coolers are rarely quieter than the stock ones with the HD5 series.


Edit:
This looks like a solid buy:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-112-HT&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1502

or indeed the XFX at a similar price:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-147-XF&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1502

One wonders how OcUK are posting such discounts on the 5870s. I'm suspicious Then again, with OcUK, there's plenty to be suspicious about!


Interesting to see the 4GB HD5970 from Sapphire still on sale. I wonder how many are just untested warranty returns Looks like Asus presumably justify the £420 price premium over the Sapphire card by selling working ones!

The overall hardware reliability of the HD5 series in general is pretty low though, something I'm hoping improves with the 6 series.

 

they just re-hired the main ecommerse guy, and hes now working directly under the boss. he quit OcUK, joined nova last year, bought over free delivery, them joined aria, did the same (yes aria free delivery via their forums), and now has rejoined OcUK, and on his first day has delivered some insane deals (while stocks last, so knowing OcUK we shall see wtf that means as they have shows stock when there isnt).

aparently a big change now, and they are looking to be best in the UK for prices on most major items, and one can (apparently) email him if a competitor has a higher price and he will lower it.


who knows how long this honeymoon lasts, once again knowing OcUK, but if they have changed, good, but most likely its just a temporary high.

yeah, im waiting for the 6 series/ next nvidia series. though i assume from nvidia its gonna be refreshing the GTX480/70 with GF104 chips, and with ATI it'll have been the refresher cards, just changed enough to be names 6 series, as 28nm wont be out.

then again roll mainstream bulldozer/sandy bridge and hopefully that will have changed. might be a newer DX verison, if only a .1 increase?

but i think my main focus is storage currently. quicky running out, down to my last couple hundred GBs, and with 2TBs hitting under £80, its hard not to jump at them. that and SSDs. really want to get the crucial C300 64GB SSD, but then i think of holding out till G3 intels, and its hard to.

doesnt help that i want to buy a new phone, seemingly im getting bored of phones rather quickly

damn i wish i had a job.

 

One man couldn't begin to solve the management woodworm that OcUK used to have, here's hoping that the rest of the company has improved in the last couple of years. Until seeing this, there hasn't really been a saving at OcUK big enough to warrant the gamble of buying from them.
I don't think DX11 is getting the patch DX10 did, it seems to be designed a bit better from the beginning. The HD6 series will just be a refresh of the 5 series with improved clock speeds and what have you. Market analysts have extrapolated it to apparently represent a 35% bonus over the GTX480, and thus a 45% bonus over the HD5870. Pure conjecture, but the '6%' difference from the GTX480 to the HD5870 was pretty much bang on, so who knows, it could prove accurate.
All I see from nvidia in the pipeline is stuff like a GTS450 and the rest of the filler material, along with a full 512 SP GTX485 with a 320W TDP, no doubt at a ludicrous price.
As for SSDs, I really don't see the need for a high-end one given how little will fit on them, two X25-Vs seem a far better deal to me than an X25-M, which in turn is a better deal than the new Sandforce drives, fast or not.

 

well ideally i would like an 80GB-100GB for boot and 120-160 for games. But a games ssd isn't that important as a boot drive, so tbh i would be happy with smal one.

im very much contemplating buying a used mac or a culv laptop(for hackintosh) aswell. Don't know why, just want to give macos a go about.

 

Wow, shaff, a hackintosh? What a coincidence!

Two weeks ago, my brother was asking me about a Hackintosh he saw on Craigs List - he wrote the guy - we pulled up the parts on newegg and the guy wasn't making any money. He was running the Mac OS, and dual booting also to Windows 7 - an i7 930 - about $1600 total tower only here in So California. My brother is a Mac guy from way back! (And I see that Valve now ports their games to Mac as of recent - I thought that was a very interesting change from Gabe Newell's former - "we don't do Mac" - position.)

Other than the Hackintosh he was thinking about buying, three nights ago I helped him take his G5 apart to fix a strange fan noise that had been driving him nuts for the last couple of months. Finally I came in where he was watching the new 47" Toshiba, and told him it was the power supply fans. He said "You mean in addition to the 7 fans we already found and tested, there's even more fans in that thing?"

We pulled the power supply out of the base - a big solid metal thing that fit neatly into the entire G5 base - 450 watts - and blew it out. Giants wads of dust came out of that thing - he's had it 6 years. It has two 50-60mm (or so) fans on the end - I guess one of the two fans was stuck, causing the other to cycle strangely - we were able to replicate the noise by blocking either fan.

Now my brother thinks I'm a computer building genius (thanks to all my tinkering with my P4) and he tells me that all the ills that he was afflicted with - bad performance - things taking longer - strange stuff - have all disappeared and it is solid again, so he'll put off any new Mac or Hackintosh purchase for a while. (I guess the power supply was over-heating and the voltages weren't steady - does that sound right to you guys?)

Haha. Thanks for keeping me honest, Sam. The card is a HD3650 - about half the power of my HD3850. I just knew one digit was 2 below my 3850 = 3830, whoops

I find that amazing! Way to go!

And as regards your 1600 dpi razer, and Jeff's 2000 dpi Habu - you say Sam that it is game-dependent - but do you ever find yourself having to tinker with mouse sensitivity from time to time to get the right balance per the game you're on?

Hmmmm - Jeff had some interesting stuff to say about that.

How do you turn it down - is it a one-button adjustment?

And Red is playing with CRAZY dpi:

Hahaha! Sorry to laugh. I have had to rig a cushion for my keyboard wrist - then a rag taped to the table with the cushion cut off the mouse pad - full-on carpal tunnel myself on both hands from those up-all-night 12-16 hour non-stop in-the-zone playing sprees I would get on! I was playing until I could barely make my arms even work at all - my fingers almost paralyzed! Hahahaha! I had to join FPS Anonymous like Shaff did I know what you mean!

More Jeff regarding my 3850:

Yeah, you're right of course.

I haven't been using my rig much - trying to get back in the rhythm of phone calls and selling houses, and also, my Valve animator family member DID mention a few months ago about maybe giving me a couple of towers that are clogging up his garage - one of them a 9450 (or did he say 9550 - I can't remember) so if he actually DID do that - that would change everything - I would probably even then pick up a 5850. I have only been over to his house once since then, for a birthday party, but I plan to start getting over there a little bit more, and maybe he'll think about reducing his garage "clutter" again, lol.

Haha. I know what you mean. When I first got on Counter Strike I was getting raped so bad - I never even knew how I got killed. I got Condition Zero to play offline and get my skills up. That was quite a while ago - that's when I stopped selling homes - all I did is shoot people - fps fps fps! I will never be close to Shaff's skill level, but I got halfway decent finally.

But I bet that you are better than you think you are - you've had a good bit of off-line practice. But it doesn't matter - even if you're majorly bad, that just gives you lots of room for improvement!

Remember Kevin, you can always choose your skill level and play with other players at that same skill level - start out with easy or normal. You have no idea how much the team chatting, with real players, adds to the game.

Also, to start with, you can create a new steam ID to use, which nobody will know - in your steam account just give yourself some random name that you will eventually change when you emerge with more confidence in your skill level - no matter how badly you think you are doing, so what? - you are totally anonymous. Call yourself "Newbie_is_me." Make a joke about it. I've played with some guys who had those kinds of "newb" names, who were killing everybody! They just never changed their name as their skill level rose.

Also, Kevin, keep in mind, no matter how badly you played, it would be impossible for you to inspire the wrath from your teammates that is reserved for "griefers" - guys who go online for the sole purpose of killing their own teammates.

Anyway, if you ever want to try on-line on Left 4 Dead, I'll have you jump in with me on a team - I'll take care of you (and I will be majorly rusty - I haven't touched it for four months!) But I'll help you pick up the basics of avoiding friendly fire, and of knowing how to choose good defensive positions as you advance through the map. So let me ask you, do you have a microphone?

Rich

 

Shaff: Most games tend to show about a 1 second improvement from using an SSD over a normal high speed mechanical drive. Doesn't seem worth it for me. A few games I would want putting on there are stuff like RCT3, which reads many thousands of files and takes ages to load, that would benefit from an SSD.
You can run hackintosh on PC hardware you realise?

Rich:

Rarely, I don't require an exact sensitivity to play a particular game, I only need to adjust game sensitivity if the default is way off.

 

really? had no idea it was that small! well then less spenditure for me. would it not help alt tabbing or is that just more ram?

i realise that, thats why i want a culv laptop. i want it in portable form, so i can use it on the sofa, or when im lounging. if imma go on the PC i wouldnt want to boot up anything but windows. if i dab into linux, itd be a lappy/netbook aswell.

 

Alt-tabbing is pretty much entirely RAM amount, CPU speed and game code. Many games alt-tab instantly, even quite high-end ones, whereas others (particularly valve games) take forever, with no real sign of activity from the PC. More RAM helps, but unless you're nearly completely out of RAM and paging, I don't think an SSD will help much there either.

 

Yes, I have a mic. If you consider my defective one LOL! Doesn't work right. Can't afford a new one either. Least of my worries right now too. I gotta get my car in the shop and have the transmission flushed ASAP! Metallic Particulates in the fluid are causing the Vehicle Speed Sensor to foul up, since the sensor is in direct contact with the fluid The speed sensor is vital in this particular vehicle. It assists the computer brain (ECM) with shifting and what not. When it fouls up, every thing's fouled up LOL!
Shame about the mic too. I loved speaking to my computer Dragon naturally speaking is wonderful. For english people anyway. Its generally ready to go after install, and a couple voice exercises. Windows 7 has a built in appy that's highly similar though. Supposedly, it can adapt to any language. It simply needs to learn your speech style.

 

For American english people. More difficult with british accents I found.
Also, my microphone was £6, which is less than $10, just saying...