The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

DDP, you're right - those scheming russkies!

They are still upset that they had to virtually single-handedly defeat Hitler while the US and Canada took our sweet time getting into the war. Well why not, we got to play around there in England "training" for the big event, and that of course took several years. Makes sense to me. We're not going to leave all those good-looking British gals for Sam and his buddies are we?

Well, I have spent all night watching youtube videos about guys who know how to overclock their 920s to 4 ghz on air - certainly 3.8 rock solid at a minimum. My 940 should be able to do as well - maybe a hair better - but 3.8 would give me overall about a 20% cpu power gain. Not huuuuuge, but 36 instead of 30 fps in arma3, so I guess that would be worth it.

I have almost got myself motivated now to stop fooling around and get serious about stomping on this i7 and getting some good numbers out of it.

I have the TRUE sitting in a box - time to unpack it and slap it on the 940. I have heard about a new thermal paste based on carbine - I think it's called thermine. They claim to beat arctic silver 5 like about 2 to 1. Anyway, what does anybody know about it - and should I get it?

As for memory, there are plenty of 8 gigs of corsair 1866 with 9 Cas for under $100 at newegg. There is even a 2133 corsair for under $100, but 11 cas. Then, continuing to scroll down newegg, I found a 2133 corsair pro version, for $139, that has the same 9 cas and low 1.5 volts as the 1866. None of this will matter on the 940, as I won't even be pushing it past 1600, but I plan to take the memory with me to Haswell, where I might be looking at 4.5 or 5. So I'm thinking, for the extra $40 maybe I should get the 2133 - what does anybody think?

Rich

 

Everybody likes Canadians better than Americans - even Americans like Canadians better than Americans. That's why we want to make you a state.

I thought everybody agrees that Stalin already had Hitler defeated before Normandy - it was just a matter of time - and we decided to act in haste before all of Europe turned "red." Sure we were nipping at the Nazi's heels in Africa, and England's air force heroically held out by a miracle, and the Canadians were in there somewhere - where was Dieppe? Italy?

Hitler decided not to invade England - I guess he figured that he would not have the same success as he had in France - that he'd be fighting in every field - anyway he decided to leave them "on their island" and go north into Russia where he got caught by the cold just like Napoleon. When almost a million Germans surrendered in Stalingrad - that was the beginning of the big turnaround, and the factories in the Urals started pouring out better tanks - thousands of them - then the big Russian wounded bear was fighting back with a vengeance. Most of what I've read said that Russia would have beaten Germany without Allied help, even though Stalin was nagging Churchill and Roosevelt to get more involved in Europe and launch the D-Day offensive.

Anyway, in my own private war with the i7, I officially surrendered today, and I am in the process of turning it into a domesticated sunroom computer for everybody's use - no gaming.

I have a question - I've done a little googling but not enough. It has 12 gigs of ram, but in Task Manager if you go to resource manager, you see that 4 gigs is dedicated to hardware - like pcie stuff. I thought I had found a bios entry called bottom map - something like that - in the memory section. It said that was the area for dedicating memory to hardware. But when I set it to 2 gigs instead of auto, nothing changed - it still showed 8 gigs effective installed, and in windows, resource manager was the same, so I set it back to auto.

I'm not really that concerned with the domesticated i7 940, but in the future on the up-coming Haswell build - should I purchase at least 12 gigs of ram, if not 16, to be safe and to be able to count on the system making available a net of at least 8 gigs for games?

Rich

 

I rounded up - I believe the correct number is something closer to 650,000 Germans surrendering, along with a Field Marshall, first time in German history that a field Marshall ever surrendered, and he was treated pretty well by his Russkie hosts, eventually settling in East Germany. But his men were marched to Siberia and only 5,000 survived to return after the war.

The German big tanks were impressive, the few of them that there were, but German industrial capacity was weakening due to heavy aerial bombardment - and they really didn't have that many of the giant tanks at the front. The British and American tanks in Africa weren't that enormous either, but they were nimble, and if you could close the gap, as I recall from playing COD2, you had a good chance against the stronger Panzers.

But yeah the Germans just totally overextended themselves. Unlike you I wasn't there so I'll defer to your memory.

Sea lion I'll have to look up some other time as I am buried converting this i7 to nice domestic use.

Here's a technical question for you, why, ddp, do you think that on this i7, the computer is devoting 4 gigs of the 12 gig ram to hardware, leaving me effectively only 8 gigs of ram for programming. I have to start up the 9450 to see what it is doing regarding the 8 gigs of memory that it has, but I have not been able, so far, to get a good answer on google as to why a computer would take 1/3 of the memory and allocate it to pci and pcie support.

That makes me wonder if the same thing is occurring on Sam's 12 gig machine, and when Sam says he regularly sees games using 6 or 7 gigs - maybe he is really smart to have that extra 4 gigs standing by. Maybe I'll have to think in terms of 12 gigs on any future i7 or i5 build.

Rich

 

It's fast approaching hardware shakeup time in the PC department for me once again. Having played a couple of games recently at 3840x2160 I remembered how enjoyable and immersive it is. Still, only on lower detail and in lighter games due to the inevitable graphics demand.

Server's PSU is also sounding like its on its last legs (fan bearing grinding & also louder than usual electrical noise) so that's due for replacement. At the same time I fit that I'm looking at fitting an automated fan controller, perhaps an NZXT Grid+ so I can adjust the primary case fans in there, as I'd forgotten just how noisy they were when after 57 days uptime, I shut my server down briefly to check something on it! I suppose three 120mm fans at 1800rpm or so is always going to notice...

The 6TB WD drives are now out and about in the wild, and I suspect next time I'm upgrading disks I'll switch out some 2TB disks for these, to allow the 2s to take over from the 1TB backup drives, and retire the latter.

I'll be sticking a bigger SSD in my main gaming PC soon, I'm thinking probably a 480GB M500. The 128GB Samsung might stay alongside it, but assuming I don't end up needing to dual boot O/Ses (Windows 8 is proving particularly frustrating at the moment!) then it will likely go to my LAN PC to supplant the 40GB X25-V and 750GB mechanical.

Then comes the big one, how to upgrade my main PC for gaming at 3840x2160? Really, there's still no proper viable option for that, nor will there be until 2015 when the next refresh is released. At this stage I'm not sure I'm prepared to wait that long. I could buy one nice, quiet non-reference R9 290X but adding a second in crossfire will be almost impossible for cooling reasons. I could get a pair of reference R9 290s or 290Xs, but that will definitely mean a new PSU for this PC too, and an incredible amount of noise, not to mention having to manually adjust fans every time I play games again. After my HD4870X2 setup was retired, I don't much fancy going back to that again...
Despite the imminent price cut for a small order of R9 295X2s to a very reasonable £700, I'm not putting water cooled equipment in my PC. Sorry, not going to happen!

On the nvidia side things are lot easier, as the GTX780Ti fits the bill perfectly - the power consumption is not unreasonable, the performance is there, and two cards can run in parallel without creating undue heat and noise concerns. However, aside from the eye-watering price tag of £1000 for a pair of reference-cooled cards, they're also only 3GB cards, which for 2160p is already looking a bit thin...

Were there a 6GB equivalent to the GTX780Ti for reasonable money I'd be strongly considering two of those. As it is though, there's nothing really that fits my requirements. To think people complain that GPUs are too powerful these days and anything more is pointless... I want to go find some of these people and give them a slap!

Meanwhile, what do we think about this - possible secondary in portrait mode?
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2014/09/05/dell-5k/1

 

Good grief, I came to this thread to seek some insight about the latest and greatest low-profile video/graphics cards for a HTPC ... and instead I find knuckleheads arguing about the history of World War 2. "MODERATOR!!!" LOL

Seriously, though, I am looking for recommendations. I have been watching for a new low-profile card with an AMD Radeon 'R9' GPU, but have not seen one as yet? The alternative of course would be a comparable latest low-profile Nvidia GeForce card.

I do have a proprietary PSU wattage limitation (approx. 300W). I am currently running the following three cards in my three similar HTPC systems (listed in the order of perceived performance; 3 being best):
1) Sapphire AMD Radeon HD6670 1GB GDDR5 (low-profile)
2) Nvidia GeForce GT640 (rev.2) 1GB GDDR5 (low-profile)
3) Sapphire AMD Radeon HD7750 1GB GDDR5 (low-profile)

I do not do any gaming, but am looking for cards which will support UHDTV 4K media playback. Any advice offered will be greatly appreciated.

Cheers!
Robert.

 

You'll get used to that in this thread

4K will work off pretty much anything these days if you're just using 30Hz off HDMI.
300W is a reasonable amount to work with, but what are the specs of the rest of the PC? We'd need to know how much spare PSU headroom you have.

 

-------- Well, for Renninga's sake I'll keep the WWII short. MODERATOR!!!!! ----------


DDP - damn your historical accuracy!

Yes, I was off by a mere order of magnitude. I don't know where I got that 675,000 figure - pulled it out of a hat. The real figure is about a 10th of that - maybe I was thinking 95,000, and over time the figure just multiplied, the way that the megapixels on Sam's monitors keep going up into the stratosphere.

But I just did read this in an article about Stalingrad:

That's not the same as 650,000 surrendering, and it doesn't exactly justify my faulty memory - but ......
MODERATOR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Bios update - yeah maybe that's what it is. I checked my 9450 and was pleased to see that it wasn't doing anything funny in dedicating more than a few MB of ram to hardware.

That actually did come up in some of the forums. That - or a bad stick, or ..... But thanks, ddp, one day I'll look at the bios version and see if there's an update. They have an easy-to-use <crosses his fingers> bios update procedure. But again, now that I have domesticated the i7 and abandoned any plans to invest weeks of time into pulling pitifully little extra cpu power out of, versus what sounds much better - the idea of buying a new Haswell rig, I think the 8 gigs that is available of the 12 gigs is fine for day to day usage.


Sam, I see your wandering eyes are now on that 5k Dell - at a mere $2500 - less than what you spent on your 4k isn't it?

I don't know about that one. It's one thing to be on the bleeding edge - but when do you realistically think gaming will catch up with 14.7 million pixels - we're all still trying to envision a possible future emulation of your leap into 8 million. For crying out loud, I just decided to go back to work to afford the dough I'm gonna have to layout just because you decided to take immersive gaming to a whole new ridiculous level again!

But seriously - let's talk about 5k in 2020.

(And I have no idea at all about what you were getting at - "possible 2nd in portrait") ? ?

That is interesting that even simple games feel so much more immersive on that 4k of yours.

I like the nvidia idea - but 3 gigs - what are they thinking? Not for those kinds of pixels. Yeah, you'll have to get a good nvidia brand with serious attention to memory - there nvidia goes again with not enough memory. But one of their labels will pony up - how much do you want? Minimum of 4 I'd say, and I like your thinking about 6. I see the R295x2 has 8, but that equates to really "just" 4, like Jeff's card.

Sam, that super game that I just played - just meaning about a year or two ago - assassins creed 4 with all the terrific sailing - they made that game to be able to play it on 4k monitors. If you ever get going with those serious graphics cards, then you should get that game.

By the way - now that I think about it - why are you so concerned about water? Your motherboard, ram, cpu - all don't amount to any substantial investment compared to your monitor and what you would shell out for the 8 gig R295x2 - do they? So what if worse comes to worse and you totally ruin your mobo, ram, and cpu. Would it take out the psu too?

Okay, ram, mobo, psu, cpu - about $1,000? Now, what is the reasonable probability of that happening - let's say 10%.

So in one sense, you're fretting over $100, and about to invest in $1000 to $2000 in graphics cards. I would say - live right out there on the scary bloody edge of reality, and do the water thing!!!

All those who agree yell "gurgle gurgle" - you know, drowning sounds! hahahaha

Is there such a thing as computer insurance? Would ordinary homeowner's cover it? Maybe Lloyd's can help out. "I want to run a super duper graphics card that relies on water cooling, and do you insure in case my computer explodes and takes out half of London?"

Rich

 

Just received an email from Rockstar. Grim news for me

"Rockstar Games is proud to announce that Grand Theft Auto V will arrive on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on November 18, 2014 with the PC version to follow January 27, 2015"

 

Yeah I heard about that earlier. All aboard the scummy console port train!

 

Grrr!!! LOL! I guess I've been patient this long. Whats a few more months...

I just hope it's at least RELATIVELY free of bugs

 

It's not bugs so much I'm worried about, I'm just hoping it's free of nasty social club shenanigans and perhaps most of all, isn't going to need 32GB of video memory to run at 3840x2160

 

Indeed! I hated the way GTA IV was/is. I prefer an effortless, clean install, without all the BS! I hope my GTX 570 can at least run it at medium/hi settings for the time being. But, I suppose tax return time is not long after the purchase of the game

I need an updated Nvidia card for my encode purposes anyhow.

 

Still waiting on a card that satisfies me for 4K gaming. There's still nothing out there that appeals to me right now. The only thing that really suits is a single non-reference R9 290X, but that leaves no scale to use crossfire if I later want (two non-reference cards blowing into the case [and onto the PSU] that use nearly 300W apiece is not a good idea!). Two reference 290Xes, apart from needing me to upgrade to a 1KW PSU would also be ridiculously loud and require some creative use of side case fans. I was happy to leave all that behind when I swapped my HD4870X2s for HD6970s, I have no intention of going back to those days again

The way things are going I can see me biting the bullet and getting a 290X then swapping out once 20nm cards arrive to provide enough grunt and video memory for 4K without ridiculous TDP levels.

 

Unfortunately, I cannot even consider AMD GPU's. I use Nvidia GPU's to feed video frames to the CPU. And the driver, is dependent on Nvidia

 

The GTX780Ti would do fairly well in SLI for me, but apart from being pretty ruinously expensive for a pair, they're only 3GB cards, which is already a bit tight for 4K. If the next Geforces are below 250W each, 4GB or more and moderately priced (even if this means taking the A-1 or B model) then I'll definitely consider them. AMD drivers are certainly currently at the stage where holding any sort of brand allegiance is just foolish.

 

DGDecNV is only compatible with Nvidia. Not really an allegiance issue lol