The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

I grew up in portland oregon. Very large city. One of the largest in the US I believe. Which is probably why I like the small town life. I like a change of pace every now and again

Which is why I took on an Xbox 360 mod challenge. It just went from challenging to REALLY challenging though. The original drive just quit while trying to back it up to Bin file. Which means I have to manually give the new drive everything it needs. Not sure how to do that yet, but I am searching forums, and asked in one of the main Xbox threads

 

The entire Graphics thread has my permission to shoot me, if I ever buy another monitor that doesn't have HDMI! I finally got the Xbox replacement drive where I BELIEVE to be ready, and wanted to hook it up to my monitor. No HDMI. So I go for an adapter. Well...this particular monitor doesn't give much space for a cord + an adapter. The Tv is in use, the only other monitor in the house that has an HDMI is also in use. Sucks to be me LOL! I'm gonna be anxious as hell wondering what the xbox is gonna do, until I can test it.

 

you can wire a VGA output to your Xbox. my monitor also supports HDCP which is a must have to watch those BlughRay video's

 

I forgot about a different style adapter I have. Gonna try it momentarily

The adapter worked a treat! No audio, but it did what I needed it to. Had to log into my windows live id to get the damn thing set up though. M$ should be ashamed how they have the factory settings. It's a friggin gaming console, not a friggin computer. Not even computers are that strict! And oh boy is it loud! It makes my secondary and primary look like a silent enthusiasts dream come true. I think my primary is slightly too loud, and the Xbox is even louder. Damn! LOL!

 

haha - yeah that was the funny part about playing GTAIV - that windows live thing they're doing, to get on the steam bandwagon.

Well, as you guys saw from yesterday's post - I went over to Miles' place again, and helped him free some space in his garage by picking up 4 towers. All of them somewhat oldish - except for the "bad" motherboard with q9450 and 8800 in it. Well, of course, that was the first one on the test bench.

HEY GUYS, GET A LOAD OF THIS!

. . . . . . . . . Hey Hey Hey, It's Fat Albert time!!!

Don't laugh, guys! I know that score doesn't impress these days, with Red around 22,000 as I recall, Sam over 25,000, everybody else around 20,000, but remember - that's more than double my p4 score.

As I first powered it up, I saw with great pleasure that the screen activated, and the machine started posting. So it looked to me that I had good memory, mobo, and gpu - right away it just looked like some kind of hard drive problem.

There was some funny stuff in the Bios. According to the bios the Sata drives were in a Raid configuration, but in another part of the bios, Raid was not implemented. I changed the Raid configuration to the IDE choice, and that way the XP setup CD finally saw the two sata drives. But the drive that Miles told me he had been booting from, had no partition. I added a partition, changed the bios boot order, and then suddenly the original xp came up, asking for username and password, so I called Miles again.

I tried several combinations - one appeared to work - and I even started to Repair the XP, but hit some fatal errors later in that process. Miles said there was no data recovery needed, so I wiped both drives, re-partitioned, and did a fresh xp install.

The disk that Miles said had XP on it, according to Speedfan SMART data after things started working, has 140 re-assigned sectors - sounds like a pretty junky drive, like my 160 gig that ended up running super slow, with many re-assigned sectors.

So, my theory on what happened, is that the disk started developing problems right away, started assigning bad sectors, then some went bad while being used, all within the first two weeks, and finally it wouldn't boot up any more. That was the end of Miles being able to work on that machine, and the techs at corporate suspected the Asus - "We've been having some problems with that mobo" they said.

The two drives are 250 gigs, and 500 gigs, but Xp setup partitioned them both at 131 each - I am not sure why. Anyway, for now, I guess I could just install a couple of games on the machine the way it is, and just start using it for a while, before I gear up to move everything over to to my spedo case.

I spent several hours going through an entire review on the P5E x38 board, and it's okay. Basically it's a fairly well-cooled $200 crossfire board with 32 pci-e lanes. Apparently it overclocks fairly well, and for stability at higher fsb settings, a little bit of chipset fan cooling helps a lot - there seems to be plenty of room to put a small fan on both the northbridge and the southbridge. And while I'm at it, a REAL hsf would be helpful, like a TRUE, or whatever.

But for now, until I get serious about moving up from the 8800, there's enough ventilation with the 120 exhaust turned on full-speed (a little rheostat is attached to the fan) and with the Q9450 running at stock clocks. Wouldn't you guys think that the Q9450 at stock clocks overpowers the 8800 for now? - that's my bottleneck, the gpu, right?

So, yeah, I'll throw a couple of games on it, like Hells Highway, including the save points, and now maybe I can finish the game, with the Q9450 taking care of my rain problem! Should I overclock the 8800 until I get rid of it in 6 months?

Rich

 

Hmm, good point. It wasn't there in the chart. However, from memory in those tests it's likely to be 265W at full load, and 25W at Idle. At High-clock idle, I couldn't possibly say.

Well with a single core P4, it's obligatory. When you have a quad core, things change!

Kama Bays only require 3 5.25" slots. You just won't be able to use an optical drive. No big deal right?

My current 06 score is 27,150 Set at the beginning of the year with the i5 750.
That HDD definitely sounds like a root problem for that system, but drives don't just appear in RAID for no reason, so whether it's a fault or user error, the board is still partly to blame.
The 8800 is indeed the bottleneck for that system. A stock Q9450 will limit systems to about 16,000 3dmarks. If you want to exceed that you'll need to overclock it. Even at a wimpy 3.6Gghz though, with enough graphics power, you should be able to break 20,000, in XP at least. Remember that XP limits you to 2 GPUs though!
I would advise against overclocking the 8800, you won't gain any extra performance, and you'll likely break it. nvidia cards do not like getting hot, especially when they're old.

 

Ok, my previous statement about the Xbox 360 was misguided. You can create an offline account rather quickly. That changes things greatly. I apologize about this mistake. Perhaps they should have labeled this better though. E.g. on the first screen.

Man oh man is that sucker loud LOL!

 

First off, congrats on finally getting some new hardware. That was a long time coming

Yeah right now your bottleneck is the GPU. Overclocking a little wouldn't hurt though even if you're unsure what it'll do. 3GHz would be exceptionally easy on a Q9450.

No you shouldn't overclock any video card. Video cards are not like CPUs and I have seen many many people fry video cards from overclocking, even on stock voltages. Just be satisfied with the fact that your new setup will likely be miles faster than the old one. Yes I would guess Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway would run much better. With a slightly better video card you could even take a crack at Crysis. A 5850(though a bit more than slightly more powerful ) isn't monstrously expensive and would match a mildly OCd Q9450 nicely. I do believe that would handle the majority of games out there at 2560 x 1600. The monster demanding games would take at least another 5850 to be reasonable.

 

Ahhh - makes sense! Thanks!

Yeah I had just put the new xp on - now I've added both service packs and everything is up to speed, except for the various versions of .net - I'll get to that in a minute. (I have sp3 but I don't think I need it - well yeah, as I recall there is one game that insists on having it - well I'll put it on if I have to.)

Beyond the 131 gig partitions, I now see the unallocated space on the two sata drives, but I decided just to clone the 500 barracuda D drive where my xp is, to a 750 sata that I pulled out of the p4 when I increased the fsb from 200 to 210 and lost my sata controller, lol.

Hdtach shows good read speed on that drive, until about the 500 gig point where it starts dropping - so I just cloned over to 500 gigs and left the other 180 gigs unpartitioned - later I can use them for vista and/or windows 7 maybe.

Now I'm in a mad campaign to get all my games over to that machine - except for crysis and warhead - I own both of those but I'll wait on those.

I guess I'll be able to play Far Cry 2 now, and also World at War. I don't own Modern Warfare 2 nor Bad Company 2, but from all the talk on this forum about those - particularly Bad Company 2, I'll watch for a Steam special on those two games.

I own World in Conflict, and I was going to sell it on ebay, but now I think I have the horsepower to play it. Also I enjoyed Company of Heroes a lot, I'm putting that on also. Those are pretty much my only two non-fps games. For COH, I like to play the first campaign, lining up all the ATT cannons and building a row of tank barriers that feeds the panzers in towards headquarters, driving parallel in front of me while the ATT guys frantically blow them to rubble, haha.

I have 60 gigs of Steam content. I'm going to copy all that over to my external portable little 2.5" drive, and dump it all on the new drive, and then let Steam figure out how to install each game for me - no way do I want to take days downloading all that stuff. I have tried the "copying files over from an external drive" method before (but not for so much content) and Steam was always able to figure it out.

You guys crack me up - no pun intended. I am sorry, but without an optical drive, I would only get to play Steam games, and I still have a bunch where I need the game disk, like COD2, COD4, Far Cry 2, GTAIV, Co of Heroes, World at War, World in Conflict, Hells Highway, BF2, etc etc. Yeah I guess I could figure out how to "break" the optical habit, but nahhhh - not worth the trouble. However, I WILL start trying to buy more games on Steam, and fewer games on ebay - and that will help.

Wait a minute, I guess on second thought, I could always get an external optical usb - it's just to get the game started. Here's one - what do you guys think?



If you guys like that idea, I could put a kama bay in this thing - like I say other than the hsf and the psu, it has only one 120mm rear exhaust - that is it! So a kama bay would help me work with this existing case for a while. The hsf is a spiral type with fan inside the spirals, pointing toward the rear exit - I don't know how much overclocking I could do with that and a kama bay.

First of all, sam, sorry for not remembering, it's 27,000 plus, not a mere 25,000 3dmark6 points, haha. So the cpu is good for up to 20k - ok.

This is a brand new 8800 that has only had two weeks of use. I have read some of the overclocking settings that people were using when this card was popular two years ago - my good friend ati tray tools won't work - what's the other one.

Jeff, you've got an 8800 that is still going strong, right? Have you ever overclocked it?

Keep in mind that I don't really need it to last for 2 years - it's just until I can afford an ati card that will blow it away. How would a $300 5850 stack up against the 8800 performance-wise?

Oh, here it is - Jeff has some really good input on that:

I know, shaff was even starting to bitch me out about it!

Excellent!

Rich

 

All you need to do is copypaste the steam files over and then run the steam exe, let it install the service for you and all your games are done. No installation or downloading needed (unless the games are out of date and need patching of course)
The drop in performance on the 750 drive at the 500GB mark is probably where it runs onto the third platter instead of just the first two.
8800s (I don't think you said which one) are reasonably powerful, but they're not going to run either of the Crysis games at 2560x1600 without being on almost minimum detail level.
External optical drive is what I was implying. Enclosures aren't expensive, and you don't lose any performance, because unlike HDDs, ODDs can't break the 30MB/s USB2 barrier.
Stop even thinking about overclocking the graphics card. It gets you such a tiny amount of performance boost you'll never notice unless you actually look at the numbers, and it shortens the lifetime of cards considerably, especially geforces.

Here's how the 8800s as a whole stack up, compared to current cards, and the HD3850.
/1.268
8600GTS/9500GT: 45
9600GSO (G94): 60
GT220: 65
8800GS/9600GSO: 90-100
8800GTS (G80): 95-105
HD3850 (PCI Express): 100
9600GT: 105-115
HD4670: 110
GT240: 120
HD3870: 120-125
HD5670: 130
8800GT/9800GT: 140-150
HD4830: 150
8800GTS G92: 160
8800GTX: 170
9800GTX: 175
HD5750: 190
9800GTX+/GTS250: 190-200
HD4850: 200
GTX260: 215
HD5770: 220
HD4870: 240
GTX260-216: 240
HD4890: 270
GTX280: 270
GTX460: 295
GTX275: 300
GTX465: 305
GTX285: 310
HD5830: 310-320
GTX460 1GB: 325
HD5850: 375
GTX470: 380
HD5870: 430
GTX480: 450

 

Final Fantasy XIV [Depth of Field Disabled]

Minimal: Radeon X1800 series/HD2900 series/HD3650/HD4650/HD5570 or above, Geforce 7800 series/8600GT/9500GT/GT220 or above
Reduced: Radeon HD2900 Pro/HD3850/HD4670/HD5570 or above, Geforce 8800 series/9600GSO G92/GT220 or above
Moderate: Radeon HD4770/HD4850/HD5750 or above, Geforce 8800GT/9800GT/GTS250 or above
Good: Radeon HD4890/HD5830 or above, Geforce GTX260-216 or above
Optimal: 2xRadeon HD4890 (79%)/HD5830 (57%)/HD5850 (32%) or above, Geforce GTX480 or above
Extreme: 3xRadeon HD5850 (156%)/HD5870 (121%) or above, 2xGeforce GTX480 (71%) or above

Final Fantasy XIV [Depth of Field Enabled]

Minimal: Radeon HD3870/HD4700 series/HD5750 or above, Geforce 8800GT/9600GT/GT240 or above
Reduced: Radeon HD4870/HD5830 or above, Geforce GTX260 or above
Moderate: 2xRadeon HD4890 (84%)/HD5830 (58%)/HD5850 (38%), Geforce GTX480 or above
Good: 2xRadeon HD5870 (94%)/3xHD5830 (167%)/3xHD5850 (129%), 2xGeforce GTX470 (78%)/GTX480 (43%)
Optimal: 4xRadeon HD5870 (258%), 3xGeforce GTX480 (164%)
Extreme: N/A





What on earth did they do to depth of field. Two completely separate games, pretty much!
One that will run on an old X1800GTO, and the other which can't even get close to max on four GTX480s!
Assuming Depth of field is broken and ignoring it, the actual game isn't too bad, getting the extreme preset for 2/3 modern GPUs, as long as it looks good, is acceptable (Sadly) these days.
The game is slightly biased, as the GTX470 scores above the HD5870 most of the time, but it's nothing too severe.

 

if you cant be bothered with steam you can always use, phoenix unpacker.

 

FFXIV should perform better on the Nvidia's as its what the game is based around there only doing a PC, PS3 launch. still its interesting non the least. DoF is a must have on at all times FFXI had a registry optimization for DoF. im sure FFXIV will too

 

Do you know what the fps was with DoF enabled? Last I checked, which was a while ago, it was capped at 30fps so it might not be a big deal if the game is hideously hard to run.

 

If the frame rate is capped at 30fps it's not obvious as none of the card tested could reach that frame rate.

 

wow, they either didn't test a low resolution like 1680x1050 or the game has been massively improved since the early beta.

 

They tested 1280x1024. Not even the GTX480 could manage 30fps at that resolution with Depth of field enabled.

 

wow then I hope the game really looks good. During the beta I was constantly hitting 30fps although I haven't played since it was first released since the updates take to long (12+ hours). I'm interested to see what changes they made to get a performance hit like that.

 

there is something wrong with there test machines, there's got to be. i too was also stuck in the 26~30 range.