The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

Saw mention of NFC tags and thought I would add something, @Estuansis.

If you haven't already discovered Tasker, go check it out - as simple or as advanced phone automation that you can be faffed to set up. It may appear daunting to begin with but it's not hard to grasp and I have a feeling it will appeal.

7 day trial from the dev's website (and a good Wiki on getting started) - http://tasker.dinglisch.net/

 

(Ripper - didn't see your post - either I'm blind or it didn't show up at first ????)

Jeezz! You're way up on this stuff, Jeff!! Awesome!! I like how they promote candy bars and deserts with the names for the revision numbers of the OS. Kitkat is my dad's favorite!!

So I know what Gran Turismo is - racing. What is Dino Crisis 2? Sounds like Kevin's big favorite - Angry Birds. But the picture used by the guy who did the mod initially, shows some kind of first person shooter - am I correct? Which one might that be - would you have any idea?

By the way, where is Kevin (Omega) these days - over on the builder thread?

Rich

One more question - since you and Ripper brought up the NFC stickers, and you say it pulls some wireless power from the phone and then runs an ap - in this case running the software for the controller, let me ask you.

Is the controller plugged into the phone - or is it wirelessly linked to the phone through this NFC sticker? ​

 

NFC chip in phone, wirelessly activates NFC chip in sticker by a small RF field to communicate. Range of a couple of inches/4cm. This is a Nexus 5 mobo with the NFC chip highlighted:



Edit: Phrasing

 

My laptop CPU had been locking up randomly as of late - no processes to blame, clean of viruses, flash/drivers/otherwise all up to date, etc.

Anyway, I narrowed it down to a faulty charger after figuring bad power supply on a desktop can cause a lock up and noted it wasn't ever happening when running on battery. Picked up a new one and so far so good. I thought finding a replacement would be a nightmare as it's a HP but thankfully not, £30/$50 later.

Has anyone ever run in to a similar problem with a laptop?

 

Oddly, I haven't been receiving updates to the thread.

So, I could be waiting as much as 4 months for GTA V? :S NO!!! Release it early! Just for me LOL!
http://www.amazon.com/Grand-Theft-A...=UTF8&qid=1409078351&sr=8-1&keywords=GTA+V+PC

 

December 31st is a provisional date - it basically means 'all we know is it'll be 2014' - in practice it could be the pre-christmas rush (i.e. October/November), or it could easily be Spring 2015.

Once again my lack of posting has caused me to fall behind on this thread - sorry for abandoning you guys! Four days away at a LAN party and spending a bit too much time on the other forum I administer, I feel like I'm neglecting aD lately

 

I had a feeling it was something like that. I'm hopeful for fall. NOT winter lol. And certainly not spring!

 

Yes you are, Sam, lol. But keep in mind that just because they made you admin doesn't mean you can be like ddp and live in Canada, of all places.

Nice hearing from you again, Kevin- I wondered where you had gone.

I'm glad you figured out that strange laptop problem, ripper - good use of diagnostic logic.

A friend had a laptop that I couldn't get to post about a week ago - it would start and then turn off - I thought maybe the cpu fan was stuck and it was an over-heating issue. I know 10X more than my friend, but I was scratching my head. He calmly pulled out the battery and waited 30 minutes, and then it started working correctly. He said "Well, that's what helps on my phone."

I was somewhat amazed. I googled it, and followed a few forums, and yes, that is the recommended HP Pavilion dv5000 "hard reset" which also includes holding down the power button for 30 seconds to fully drain the capacitors (my friend took note of that - maybe there is no need to wait a half hour.) The idea is to leave only the Eprom tiny round battery source, forcing the bios to completely disengage from all devices and have to go re-establish contact again when you power it up. Sheesh - laptops!!

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Jeff, thanks for the image (oh wait that was from you, ripper, thanks!) Probably everybody else knows the answer, but my question was - is the controller plugged into the phone? I'm thinking it is - but maybe I'm wrong.

Ok, I know the NFC chip in the phone activates the NFC chip in the sticker - which somehow tells the controller to run its drivers? I'm lost after the sticker NFC gets activated - what happens then that causes that controller to work - and is the controller plugged into the phone???

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(Latest short news from arma 3 - I finally figured out how to dismantle the standing mk-30 machine gun - which has major high-powered scope including hot thermal mode where bodies light up white - and move it where I want. I have to arrange to get the two packs picked up, the machine gun and the tripod - and then drop whichever one I am carrying and tell the other squad guy to go assemble the thing. I thought that would be a major game-changer in one scenario, but they had implemented fog and I couldn't see far enough to spot any enemies and figure out where to set up the machine gun - so it was of limited use - this was last night. I'm sure it will eventually turn out to be useful someday.) ​

Rich

 

Thanks Rich I'm around. Keeping busy with my scrapping, and UPS part time job. I've been offered full time twice, but turned it down because It sounds like more trouble than it's worth. For now, I just try to make a little more money on the side. I have a multitude of ways of making money, just lazy I guess :S

 

Rich, the gamepad uses bluetooth to connect to the phone as it's a wireless bluetooth gamepad.

All the sticker does is automate opening an app on the phone, configuring bluetooth, and readying it to work with the controller. It doesn't actually turn the controller on or connect it. That still requires a physical button press. It does simplify the process though, because all you need to do is put the controller in the dock, and hit the connect button.

Also, I think I got myself a proper job. Will be looking more into what that means when I start Tuesday... I might be getting a Haswell soon, maybe even a Broadwell

 

Jeff, thanks for the clarification about how the controller works. Did you ever submit photos of your improved model?

Congrats on the job. I hope it's not a shady operation that you can't feel good about like that last time where that guy was trying to gyp everybody. So you're taking the new Intel cpu plunge pretty soon? Why? I thought your 6-core was doing fine for now.

Me, I keep going back and forth - do I start trying to stress the i7, or not. I have it in the sunroom where the p4 is having a hard time with chrome - chrome will take up to 650 MB of ram on 4 or 5 chrome.exe tasks - and I have that machine configured with only 1 gig of ram so that I can also boot into windows 98 to run some really old software. So the i7 is sitting there with 12 gigs of ram and chrome wouldn't bother it at all.

I have it sitting on top of the other one in the sunroom, the Lian Li on top of the Antec sonata case - both nice looking black cases - the Sonata p4 with a modded side intake fan, and the Lian Li with a Kaze 3000 rpm in a top kama bay replacing 3 5.25 optical drive slots - with a fan controller. It is noiseless until I rev the kaze up - then it's noise city! That was for overclocking the i7 until I moved everything to the spedo gaming full tower.

But I just don't have that much motivation to do that project - I'm thinking more and more - new cpu - several generations newer than that 940 i7 chip - as Sam says - start with something that's already at 3.5 ghz or so rather than 2.66. And generate way less heat and burn through way less electricity!

And after having trouble getting the latest news on chrome about the ISIS bombings, I am thinking to just put the i7 into action as the general purpose computer for anyone to use - no gaming - and put the p4 away to keep for light duty real estate work, printing brochures, looking up properties in the MLS, etc. if I move back into a corporate environment and get some assistants like I used to have.


Kevin - yeah, you're lazy ..... like me.

I'm actually thinking more seriously of starting to work the phone again - but laziness has a lot of inertia. So I just started to jog again regularly, at least twice a week, to get some kind of minor discipline going.

Did I ever tell you I drove for UPS one Christmas season. It was hard work to "make standard." I had to eat my lunch on the run, and hustle hustle hustle. It wasn't bad, but sometimes I had a little bit of a hard time getting a hand truck, which I badly needed as my route was on a stretch of Ventura Blvd that was all businesses - and packages packages packages. !!

I think I know what you mean by "more trouble than it's worth" meaning - lots of very hard work!!! BTW, what's going on with that perpetual motion machine?

Rich

 

Thanks for trying to put my mind at ease. I appreciate that Futile, but appreciated Many have tried lol. I will grasp my problems, and remedy them given time

As for the device (aka generator, aka PMM), I put it on hold for purchasing a much needed toy. The Canon 70D. I very much enjoy the camera. But I kick myself everyday about not building the generator. At the same time, It does require a revision. Something I overlooked/over estimated, requires tending, lol!

 

Nope but you seem pretty intent on that so I think I will. It's largely identical to the one in the link, but with some extra rubber bands added here and there to hold everything more securely. It's not any more bulky or awkward, and it makes the entire rig much more secure.

Recently finished Dino Crisis 2(honestly, check out youtube if you want to know what a game is like) and it was very comfortable to play. I definitely got my full enjoyment out of the game. The smaller screens on phones and tablets also lend themselves well to the older graphics as the usual blurry artwork is sharpened greatly by the shrinking down. The PS1's 2D in particular is vastly enhanced by the small screen.

The PS1 has a gargantuan library of games that only the PS2 rivals. It's also one of the only 3D consoles with nearly flawless emulation on the entire game library. Even N64 emulators have a few games they just can't play due to proprietary technologies or that have some glitches. And the N64 is still somewhat performance intensive, enough that my 1.5GHz dual core phone with 2GB of RAM phone still struggles a bit.

 

Kevin, no generator! I've still gotta pay my full electric bill until you finally get around to revolutionizing it all!

Yeah, I think I'll check out Dino Crisis 2 on YouTube. I know from experience about Angry Birds, and a few others, but no dinosaurs. That's amazing Jeff when you talk about dual core 1.5 Ghz with 2 gigs ram, and you're speaking about your phone.

LOL Well only if you feel like it.

Rich

 

Well that makes sense - after all igloos are made of ice with no rebar. I wonder how 12" thick concrete compares to 12" thick ice? Like an igloo, I doubt that you have any windows in the house, but there is probably a hole in the roof to let out the cooking smoke.

It's a century home. What does that mean? In which century was the home built?

 

Our electric bill averages between 150 and $200. Sometimes higher. Largest reason I'm kicking myself :S

 

Well, as you know, ddp, I am not the historian that you are. However the fact that your house has windows is astounding to me - but it occurs to me that maybe the glass is 12" thick. Let's see - the us declared war on germany - oh, that would be about 1865, right? Oh wait, you said ww1. Hmmm ..... 1765? No that doesn't sound right. They didn't know how to make 12" thick glass back then. Okay I give up.

Jeff, you do have a pretty high electric bill. We were pushing $400 and we felt that was way out of line, although we do have a couple of roommates. Anyway, my brother dove in and we recently installed a 33 panel solar electric system, at the same time as we privately declared war on Germany - we thought it couldn't hurt.

So the solar system just went live about a week ago, and we don't yet know the effect on the bill.

Still, with all the talk about conserving energy, I wouldn't feel exactly right about super-charging that i7, even if I am finally able to get some good numbers out of it - I know it will be blasting the heat in my trailer and occasionally I'll have to turn on the AC. And with this new thinking I am raining on my own parade after I went to all the trouble and spent about $50 getting all the cables for the 850 watt power supply that I could find, so now I do have it configured where I could run my two 7950s in crossfire.

I don't know - I am still back and forth about it.

Part of me says "Invest the $100 in 8 gigs of high speed memory that you can take with you into an eventual Haswell system, turn on the noisy kaze, put the TRUE on it, and see if you can push it near 4 ghz, for a total of about 25% more cpu power." That same part says "Don't worry about the energy consumption - you guys now have solar - and you'll get 37 fps on arma3 instead of 30."

And I feel better as of yesterday about the p4. That 650 MB of ram that chrome was bogarting, I believe was the result of a malware extension that is now gone. After re-installing kaspersky on that machine and doing a full scan, and not having any effect on chrome bloating itself up into seizing all my memory, I went looking for extensions, after turning off most of the plugins. I finally went to check my version number - going to "about chrome" and there I found "extensions" and I got rid of something called chainoflove that some idiot (I am pretty sure which roommate did that) downloaded, and now chrome is behaving itself.

So the question is, do I feel like one more overclocking adventure, or should I just concentrate on this problem that Kevin and I have called "laziness" and get my real estate butt into gear?


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TAKE A LOOK AT THIS!!!!!



Make sure you touch the image for full size - you can more easily read the print. That is the $11 million dota2 tournament on the front page of the New York Times!

Gaming is big business!

I would gladly quote you more of the article, which finishes saying "And the game's developer, the Valve Corporation, moved another step closer to ...." I think it was leading to ... "declaring war on Canada" but I can't be sure since what you see is all that I was emailed by the valve animator relative.

Maybe they were moving another step closer to world domination. The column on the right of the lower picture mentions that game tournaments have been around for quite some time, and I am sure they were referring to counter strike pro gaming, another Valve game. Anyway, all of this stuff is really cool but, while I have seen Dota 2 played by my 8 year old niece, and I played it a bit with her, no way do I want to get sucked into anything that doesn't include shooting Nazis, or Canadians at least. You know, realism, like the world wars and all the little wars in between with Canada.



Rich