The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

You know me, always hanging around behind the curve so I can be cheap I guess it's a philosophy I learned from watching my dad work on cars. Do what you can with what you have, and do it nice. Quite happy where I'm at. Not starved for performance anymore. A 990 board coming this winter though I think. We'll see. Would make a second card feasible in the future and should give some small improvements in several areas

 

On the subject of the curve, allegedly the first generation AMD R series, or at least some of it launches this time next week.

It goes roughly as follows:

R9 290X: New Volcanic Islands card, branded as 'Titan Killer' - 2816 SPs (vs. 2048 in 7970), 44 ROPs at 4 TMUs each (vs. 32 ROPs at 4 TMUs each in HD7970) @ 800Mhz. 4GB VRAM on 512-bit bus at 4500-5000mhz depending on variant. Release date uncertain, may release next week. $600 / £450-£480.

R9 280X: Rebrand of HD7970GE. $300 / £220. Factory overclocked cards at 1070/6400 expected at launch for $330 / £250.

R7 260X: Rebrand of HD7790. $140 / £110.

R7 240: Modified version of HD8570, $90 / £70.

Price drops of the GTX770/780 are inbound to match these, but it's not known when these will come, or what they will be.

 

My subconscious thinks that way all by itself. The idea for my generator just clicked. Light Bulb! LOL! I haven't built it yet, because money is a constant problem for me :S Til I get it built, hopefully. I'm gonna have a hard time making money off it though, since i'm such a giving person...

I refuse to build a cheap prototype though. SO, it's gonna cost me roughly 400 - 600 USD. But, since it's relatively free energy(Self sustained), that money will pay for itself

So is the Titan still the champion?

 

The R9 290X is likely to best the Titan in the majority of neutrally-biased titles. AMD say it will render the Titan's performance laughable. In practice, it'll be 5-10% better. Still, better is better, and at $400 less money, it will make the Titan a laughable purchase, not that it isn't already of course...

 

Indeed. I don't like the idea of spending $1,000 on a GPU. That's quite out of the question LOL!

Where do you get the 5 - 10% better? This site, suggests their being VERY similar potential. Though I only briefly checked. And if AMD is $400 cheaper, it's a no brainer LOL!
http://n4g.com/news/1365331/amd-r9-290x-benchmarks-surface-better-than-gtx-titan-not-exactly

 

Sites like this one:
http://wccftech.com/amd-hawaii-r929...osed-fastest-gpu-planet-1020-mhz-clock-speed/

It's all hearsay up to this point, but when you're very close to release, you'd be surprised how often rumours are accurate.

I spent $1100 on a graphics card once. It was DOA, so was its replacement. I have not spent $1100 on a graphics card, or bought anything from that brand (Sapphire) since.

 

Yeah, I recall your problems with the sapphire card/s. I recall how irritated you were. Anybody would be

 

Call it a learning experience. It taught me how bad Sapphire were as a manufacturer, how good CCL were as a retailer for handling it how they did, and I ended up profiting from it, as not only did I get reimbursed an extra £35 beyond the full value (the cost my bank would have charged me for defaulting on rent if the refund had come a day later) for a late refund, I also got to keep the free game install I used as part of the product, so I ended up £60's worth up. Only 7% of the value of the purchase and the 20 or so hours of troubleshooting weren't really worth it, but it was a nice touch. In the end waiting another 6 months got me 20% more performance at 70% of the price, with little additional noise. I can handle that

The guys at CCL attend the Multiplay LAN party events I go to every August, I actually met the guy that handled the order at the event and thanked him in person for the good service. I feel guilty about not having used them more often since to be honest, but unfortunately being a smaller shop they don't always have what I want to buy, and latterly I'm using Amazon lockers for the most part to have my stuff delivered. Now that I'm a Bybox subscriber though, I suspect I may use companies like CCL again more often when stuff's not available on Amazon.

 

Kinda miffed about a few things but have otherwise had good experiences doing returns or replacements with most companies. Newegg have a good system in place, so even with their increasing size, they still manage to keep good customer service.

I have to say XFX was both by far the most frustrating and most pleasant to work with on different occasions. I just sent that 6970 to XFX three times and had it sent back to me twice before I was able to get their support techs to quit openly lying to my face.

The 6970 had an overheating problem since new, and by the time it got to me, required 80-100% fan for gaming and still touched the 90s at times. Just as the 760 arrived the first time from FedEx with enough battle damage to drop a Krogan, the 6970 started artifacting in games and had persistent desktop corruption after running any sort of 3D. Also, the displayport died.

I sent the card to XFX with these exact symptoms. I explained everything to them in clear English. That the card was faulty since new, and was now damaged. The first time they simply re-TIM'd the card and cleaned the cooler and sent it back. They told me that they had run overnight stress tests on it and everything checked out fine. That was lie number one. The card was incapable of handling any sort of 3D rendering, and still ran just as hot. Also, the displayport was still dead. They literally hadn't tested it at all.

So I send it back to them again. This time, they ASSURE me that the tests had been run, and the displayport was working, which was lie number two. They still hadn't tested the card, everything was still wrong with it. It was very obviously faulty, and any sort of stress test would have revealed that immediately. I tested it in multiple PCs.

So I send it back a third time. Now I'm pissed. This is starting to cost me money I don't have. I explain the situation, and that I have been directly lied to TWICE and have evidence to back it up. XFX is lying to me, failing to fulfill their warranty, and is costing me time, money, and the use of my hardware. I will not accept anything other than a new card of equivalent or greater performance and reimbursement for shipping them the same broken product twice before. I have friends with legal experience telling me to sue, so how is this going to happen guys? A few days later, the 7870 is shipped and I've received my $40

I must say the whole experience has turned me off somewhat to XFX's products... Due to the overheating card, which is apparently pretty common on certain runs of XFX 6970s, and the way I've been treated by them in this situation.

 

Most returns stories I hear about XFX (but tbh, almost all manufacturers) are the same. Unless I'm seriously out of pocket, as in several hundreds of pounds, I tend not to return stuff. It ain't worth it. Only things I RMA apart from that are hard disks and occasionally some DOA stuff. Too much work otherwise, you can end up spending money sending stuff back and still not having a working product. Besides, if I know the product is bad and a new model will only have similar issues I definitely don't RMA - that's as it was with the Asus motherboards I had except one (that exception still took a month and forcing a refund after several failed collections due to the retailer still using a bad courier).

For ref, both my HD6970s are XFX and they run fine at 50% fan speed tops.

 

I've found out that it's quite a well known issue that affected some of the later runs. Nothing to do with the cooler, airflow, or the mounting or TIM. The card is simply faulty. A shame because it performed properly, just ran so hot that it damaged itself. XFX's cards with custom coolers don't seem to have the issue. They screwed something up on their PCBs, so the cooler either doesn't make full contact, or the power management is screwed. Not the first time I've seen an overheating XFX 6970.

You didn't exactly get lucky Sam, but you did avoid the bad batch of cards. I'm not surprised that yours are fine. Most of them are. I think it was the last production run that had the issue, as this card was bought around the same time that Newegg reviews started mentioning this issue. After the HD6970 had gone out of production.

 

There may also have been a percentage chance of defects from earlier on, and the last batch sold were all ex-RMA cards. That does happen sometimes. One can only speculate

 

That's certainly a possibility. My point being though, the card was not a fluke and the issue was well known to XFX. Strange that they would try so hard to avoid giving me my double lifetime warranty. Only hurts their reputation. Especially after they replaced one of my 6850s instantly. I can understand business, but they're not going to shut me up by sending me the same broken product over and over again.

 

CANADA AND OTHER WARS
Seriously, dude, you're talking almost 200 years ago!!!!! I am not sure my history books went back that far - you know - it was only about the recent wars we have won, like Korea and Grenada and Vietnam. Plus Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan, although we are still fighting to take control of Pakistan, where recently we did have a nice helicopter mission and took out one of their major leaders Osama something or other.

I don't think we are fighting India yet, but maybe they're next.

Kevin for sure is NOT participating in the war on pornography - that much I am certain of.

Isn't rust a wonderful thing!!! I have a word doc, with hyperlinks to the games, which are in alphabetical order. It started with Far Cry 2, where the map was introduced in the beginning, but the key to zoom the map is nowhere to be found in the controls, as it is not re-assignable. I was absent from the game for a while, and I had to start all over again to find it.

But just plain old rust, from not jamming keyboard strokes and mouse movements, cannot be fixed from a few paragraphs on tweaks and key assignments. I too have been off for a while - midstream in fighting the biggest baddest monster in Tomb Raider. Literally mid-stream - they had a save when I first damaged the giant hundreds-of-years-old buddha monster - and now they are sending in archers to help him out. LOL


NEHALEM WARS
Meantime I pulled some all-nighters trying to overclock this beast of an old i7 - I got the base clock up to 184, which would get me to 4 ghz if I could get the cpu multiple back up from 14 to 22, or even 21 - but just going to 15 is not stable!!! This is the way a bunch said to do it - FIND OUT HOW FAST YOU CAN GET THE BASE CLOCK.

They told me to throttle back the cpu multiple, and then work the voltages on some of the others. I suppose the reasoning was to test the uncore and memory. Well, about the time I hit 170 base, up from stock 133, I switched down to a 6 to one memory multiple, down from 8 to 1, and that let my memory simmer on down to almost not overclocked at all. I thought that was great, and like I say, I got to 184 pretty stable. But now, no multiple increases on cpu.

So I'm down at 2.75 ghz, way down from stock 2.93, and way down from 3.2 when I was doing it my way. I am wondering if it is that 6 to 1 memory multiplier. I have to run one of the multiples (vtt?, occ? qpi? - the last all-nighter was 8 days ago - I've been moving a person out of a 20-year rental for the past week) at twice the multiple of the memory, and they say over twice is really nice for stability - but lowest for that is 16x, so 8x memory satisfies the two to one requirement, while dropping memory to 6 to 1 wayyyy oversatisfies that requirement, and maybe messes up my cpu multiple. So my next move might be to put memory back up to 8 to 1, and see if the memory will run that fast at the 184 (it held up to 1356 mhz at the 170 base, with the 8 to 1.) Maybe that is stopping my cpu multiplier. But that would be 1467 on the memory - I doubt it will go that fast.

My calculations tell me that if I can get to 3.8, that will be about an 18% cpu increase from what I have now. My current hsf, the Arctic 13 in the little Lian Li case, is not holding me back - because nothing is getting hot enough - it is unstable way before it gets hot! Seriously, I would love to see some over-heating - that is something I could deal with.

If I can get to even 3.5 with this hsf, that might give me hope that I could get to 3.8 with the TRUE in the new case.

Otherwise maybe I have to face the possibility that I have a poor overclocker chip - or maybe, actually, it might be that the slow 1066 crucial memory is holding me back.

But if I had to buy $200 worth of fast memory to solve that problem, then I figure that I might as well spend $400 more and also get a motherboard and a haswell 4670 and push that (delidded like blaze recommended) to 4.2 - 4.5 GHz, with a resultant 80-100% gain in cpu power. Which is what Sam has been saying all along!

I need to be thinking 4k, even if that is more like beginning of 2015 for Sam, and beginning of 2017 for me.

But wait, 2017? - that's what? - three whole years from now. Well, in that case, forget 4k. I'll let Sam march on ahead and work out the kinks. Like Jeff, I'll follow a little slower into that brave new world. So then, what makes sense for me, is something to hold me for three years, until the new 4k build - beginning of 2017.

That 4k build is going to be all new hardware, keeping just the TRUE and the case.

So yeah, maybe just chuck the idea of nehalem, and get Haswell, unless the tick, or tock, after Haswell, is about to show up sometime before next summer.


JEFF'S HOT NEW HARDWARE!
Hey Jeff, everything sounds great on all fronts. Did you know, that having girls as friends helps other girls be attracted to you - like you're not somebody abusive, you're a guy who gets along okay with girls.

So hang onto that friendship - and congrats on that new replacement board.

It is so nice to hear you having your prior usual hardware success rather than the more recent frustrations with memory limitations! That way you can find some more golden nugget games like the ones you always come up with, such as the OF series, and Angelina Jolie.

Wait, I have to adjust my hearing aid (as good old Russ said to me onetime when I told him his new blue hard drive was NOT an enterprise drive) did I actually catch you saying something very nice about crysis 2 graphics? "Visually stunning" - there - I looked again. Yes you did say it!

What is this wonderful mod you are talking about?

And by the way, Jeff, nice writeup on your battle with XFX. The prose clearly started gaining momentum and it was easy to see that they were about to have to deal with quite a formidable foe.

Strong! ..... Well done!

 

Just so you know, moving to 4K has zero effect on your processing requirements directly, as resolution is entirely down to the graphics capability. Normally of course, faster graphics and faster processor go hand in hand, but if you're worried about running the same games at the same settings at a higher res, CPUs have got nothing to do with it.

 

http://maldotex.blogspot.com/2013/02/maldohd-40-final-version.html

Everything you need to know. Looks absolutely awesome. Really shines Crysis 2 up. I do turn off the special AA methods, but for the rest of it I just let the mod do its job. Really what Crysis 2 should have looked and PERFORMED like. Yes, it actually performs better, but uses more video memory. Thus, the 1GB cards not liking the mod. Really an excellent mod. Fixes many issues I had with the graphics, and makes the game a true equal to its predecessor in graphical fidelity.

I like to think I just did what was needed to get my warranty. If it says lifetime, it better mean it! I want to be able to exchange it in 20 years, if the company still exists. Otherwise, what good is the warranty? They did indeed deliver though. The 7870 is a fine card. Very quiet, runs cool, overclocks to GHz-Edition specs like nothing, performs quite well. Actually a bit faster overall than the 6970, which was a factory OC'd XXX Edition. Too bad as I would be using the 7870 right now, but the GTX760 OC is such a beast that I won't even bother with it. Off it goes to make me money

 

Yeah at 1920x1200 it probably will be. At 2560x1600 it may have been the other way round.

 

Actually I did not know that. (Somewhere in a corner of my brain a month ago I paused for a millisecond and wondered if it was all just more graphics work, but then I promptly forgot about it - so thanks for clarifying that.) In that case, Haswell could keep paying dividends for a while - do you see another Intel tick or tock before next summer?

Wow, Jeff, that Crysis 2 mod is some deal! The screenshots are awesome! I should be able to run it okay, since I played the whole game with just one 7950. That was a year ago I think - and I really enjoyed the game - so maybe by next summer I'll be ready for a replay. Assuming it performs great, what do you think is an appropriate donation for all his hard work - five bucks? ..... ten bucks?

Thanks for setting me straight ddp. I assume you're okay with the other information about how we successfully invaded Canada multiple times?