The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

When a game goes from single digit dips to a solid and steady 40+FPS, there's more than FSB and extra cache at work. Unless the Q6600 was truly that badly starved for more cache. And while the CPU was degrading, performance did not. It still benched about as well as it ever did.

 

Double due to gap in posting dates.

Rich, no there's nothing special about this Q9650 except that it has a higher stock clock. At your overclocked settings your CPU is faster by virtue of being the same exact chip at a higher speed. I'm not exactly trying to squeeze ultimate performance from the chip. I just need a CPU fast enough to reliably run GTA V and high bitrate 1080p, both of which the Q9650 does with gusto. It's quite a good CPU. It also handles Wildlands okay alongside the GTX970 but that could be better. Overclocking would help a bit.

As far as I'm aware, no Core 2-based chip ever had Hyper Threading. That was something that was axed with Pentium 4 and then resurrected for the i7 series of CPUs when it was a more mature technology.

The only really special feature on Core 2 CPUs was that the Extreme Editions had unlocked clock multipliers. Instead of OCing by turning up the front side bus, you just turn up the multi and adjust voltage to scale. That was something much more common in AMD processors at the time, and something Intel didn't do regularly until the K Series i7s. My Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Black Edition was a very notable one and also my 7750 Black Edition Kuma which was a dual core Phenom I in disguise as an Athlon 64 X2 on steroids. As well as all of my lovely Phenom IIs which were all Black Editions with unlocked multipliers. X3 720, X4 940, X4 955, X6 1090T, X6 1100T. Intel lagged behind a bit in OC-friendliness.

The Q9650 is certainly a bottleneck for the GTX970 just like the 4GHz 1100T was. Because of this, overclocking should see immediate results in most games the GTX970 is suited to. These chips seem to hit 3.8/4GHz pretty easily and I have a good cooler so I will be doing some fiddling. 3.4-3.8Ghz would be fine for me. Enough to raise the performance ceiling a bit.


My only long-term issue is I would like to increase the RAM to 16GB. Right now I have all four slots populated, so overclocking is limited(this era of Intel prefers 2 sticks only) and I would be forced to buy a new memory kit. It's DDR2 which is common but getting expensive for high capacity kits. Also, for 16GB I'm basically forced to keep using all 4 slots due to size constraints.

 

Hmmmm - Ram memory - yeah when I finally do a cpu upgrade, I think I'll go for at least 16 gigs of memory - I'm running just 8 at the present time - but so far it's been enough.

I wonder about even maybe 32 gigs. That sounds like a lot, but my brother runs 32 gigs RAM in his Dell CAD workstation - of course CAD drawings are monstrous things.


Hey, game-wise, anybody hear anything about the new COD WWII?


I haven't downloaded it yet - I want to finish up Assassins Creed Syndicate first. I liked that Wildlands Fallen Ghosts DLC so much I half-way decided to play it again at hardest difficulty - but after a couple of hours, I don't know.

I DO like it, but normally I don't play a game again that soon - waiting a couple of years is a better idea.

I took a few hours and un-fogged the map, by travelling over almost all of it. I did a lot of it by river, and I realized for the first time that the water reflections are fantastic - I was travelling so much before by helicopter, I never knew river travel was so nice.



That was true also of Far Cry 2 - where you had to fight your way through a road block, then fight your way coming back again since all the same enemies had re-spawned.

Remember, Jeff, how frustrated you got with that aspect of the game play?


Sam, you played Far Cry 2 I seem to recall - that was the first game that allowed us to spread fire as a way of attacking the bad guys - which was awesome. Did you travel by river - or fight your way up and down those roads?

Kevin, did we ever get you out of Grand Theft Auto or Left 4 Dead long enough to play any of the Far Cry titles?

I didn't like those road blocks any more than anybody else. So I decided to take the river.

For the most part I enjoyed a tranquil, very beautiful, conflict-free ride.

I bypassed a lot of the frustrating repetitive conflict - fighting the same guys that had already been killed 30 minutes earlier - and so the whole gaming experience was more enjoyable.


Plus I am a total sucker for nice water reflections.

far cry 2 - very mellow, very tranquil, mostly conflict-free beautiful river travel




The river travel in Wildlands is as beautiful as anything in Far Cry 2 or in Far Cry 4.

Only Far Cry 3 is superior.


Far Cry 3 has, by far, the most fantastic water reflections of any game I have ever played. (The last Crysis was really good also but there was very little water in the game.)

Being set on an island somewhere near the equator, it seems like the Far Cry 3 devs took advantage of using equatorial warm lighting - which really is a different shade of light than what we get at the longitude of North America or of the British Isles.

(Is that right, DDP - is it longitude - or should I have said latitude?)

Gorgeous sunsets




I spent a lot of time in Far Cry 3 traveling the "croc river" which did not have any wave runners except for a wave runner in a race up at the top near the falls - at the end of the 3 minutes the race ended and you could not keep the wave runner.

But I found out that I could get the game to spawn a wave runner for me.

I ditched whatever transportation I had, and I went bow and arrow leopard hunting near the mouth of the river. I turned around, and there was my gift - my transportation of choice - a beautiful red wave runner.

And then I created a save point at one of the river safe houses, parking my wave runner right there so I could always go back to it.

Bow-hunting leopards resulted in Far Cry 3 spawning a wave runner for me




I spent hours on that river - not doing any shooting at all - just blasting up and down and sometimes colliding with the other boats that the natives were driving.

Sometimes it was fun to play "chicken" with the boats that were out there




But most of the time I didn't care if there were any other boats around - I was surrounded by intensely lush graphics.

The river was total eye-candy





Besides leopards, there were other dangerous animals.

It was especially fun to see the crocodiles eat a goat or even a native- I couldn't get too close or there wouldn't be any attack.

Man-eating crocs



If you swam up behind the croc, he wasn't that hard to kill. But out of curiosity, I put myself in the position of a native one time, and I walked along the shore line to where I knew a croc was hiding. I knew exactly where the crocs were - there was always a group of lilies with distinctive white flowers.


The attack was swift and I was dead in one second before I even knew what hit me.



In addition to leopards and crocodiles, there were other dangerous critters.

Man-eating tigers





The river was probably only about 10 km in length - it went right by the airport. Here at the top it poured down into the sea about 10 meters below.


the very top of the croc river near the falls





Speaking in terms of equatorial lighting, a while back, I had the good fortune to visit Brazil several times - 3 or 4 trips - and the photos I took at Ipanema Beach in Rio had a whole different quality of warmth than anything I had ever taken before.

A professional photographer looked at some of the shots and told me that he always headed down to Rio for certain of his beach model "calendar" projects in order to take advantage of the unique lighting.


Anyway, so that was fun - running around on the Wildlands Fallen Ghosts river ways.

And I did pick up the crossbow - it's for sure not a blowgun, it's definitely a crossbow.

But it doesn't seem to come with any type of scope - maybe there's one lying around somewhere on the map in a gun case.

I tried it a couple of times and it makes a loud "click" when you fire it, which seems anything but stealthy (but maybe that sound is only local.) However, the enemies emit a short scream when they get hit with it - you would think that would wake up the entire outpost (but again, maybe that scream is only meant to be heard by me.)

I remain mostly underwhelmed by that weapon.



I think I'll just head over to Sam's neck of the woods, and finish Syndicate over the next couple of weeks before I download WWII.

I'm also thinking of picking up TitanFall 2 since they created a single-player campaign for it which they didn't do for the first TitanFall.


Then after that, it's back to Arma3 and more of those amazingly good user-created missions - working my way through about 80 that I still haven't completed.

Unless, Jeff, you come up with another incredible tip like Wildlands.

Rich

 

CoD WW2 is respectable and the graphics are absolutely fantastic. However, its no Infinity Ward game and not even a later Treyarch title. I would like to have seen Treyarch work on the campaign. Nothing truly wrong with it but I found it boring. That said, it's very solid mechanically and quality-wise. The performance is quite good as well. Absolutely maxed on my single 1070 and holding a TRUE 60FPS lock at all times. Pretty impressive. Definitely worth a playthrough. Kinda disappointing though compared to SledgeHammer's masterpiece CoD Ghosts.

Just want to comment on my Schiit Modi Multibit DAC and give some impressions. First off, it's actually proven that the Creative ZxR is a fantastic source, despite its own tiny problems. Even some audiophile communities recognize the ZxR for its quality sound output. The TI1792A chip in it is by far the best late generation DAC chip from Texas Instruments, and has a lot going for it. However, no dedicated power supply, a small board, and an electrically noisy environment means that it's a step or two below what a true dedicated TI1792A DAC would be.

That said, the Schiit DAC is indeed a step up. Not something you'd notice with immediate A/B testing, but something that manifests over time. It's a very subtle change. I notice it much more on headphones than I do on speakers, however there are differences on both. Particularly interesting how it changed my speakers' bass response. They are much snappier and more responsive now. Also, I no longer need to turn the treble knob up a notch. Treble is clearer and more extended, but with less distortion. The bass difference is much less noticeable on my headphones as the amp makes a bigger impact there, but the treble is a large difference. My more veiled headphones have cleared up a bit, and my treble headphones have all smoothed out. Again, very subtle, but makes a difference across a large amount of time and a wide variety of media.

Particularly some of my older headphones were prone to sibilance if the soundcard did its own upsampling, and that is much reduced with this DAC. It uses Schiit's proprietary 32 bit upsampling filter instead, which is all done in hardware. I can even feed it 32 bit audio, though lack of DSD file support means I won't likely ever get to use that feature. 32-192 FLAC is exceedingly rare. It does all of its sound manipulation in 32 bit though, which in short means all the audio is untouched from the file to my speakers.

 

Hmmm. I just took a look at a Ghosts walkthrough to remind myself what that was - yeah it was pretty cool - some outer space but not too much.

I like that they have moved back from outer space to their roots - World War II.

Well it sounds like that newer audio hardware is working out well for you. I was actually thinking about you the other day when I finished Assassins Creed Syndicate.

By the date on the fraps screenshots - I had left the game almost exactly one year ago. I finished it up, then I restarted it just to refresh myself on how it all began.

There were some very early segments where the atmosphere was dark and foreboding - especially in that early segment where Evie is looking for the underground laboratory near the railroad circle with all the locomotives.

This is right at the beginning, when they first hit London.

During that segment, the game used a lot of cello music, like on a Max Payne title, as you stay high up on the walls and water tower, and drop-assassinate the various enemies patrolling all around the area.

Listening to the deep resonance of the cello, I noted how beautiful it was - then I couldn't help but wonder, Jeff, what your critical ears would have thought of the sound - since these Medusa 5.1 headphones were purchased mostly for the surround sound effects in helping me locate where gunfire is coming from.

I have little doubt that what I was hearing doesn't come anywhere close to what you achieve with your very sophisticated hardware.

Anyway, now having finished Syndicate, plus a few hours again into the beginning, I have to say that they certainly did a lot of work putting that game together, although I enjoyed the one in Paris a little more. I think that title was AC Unity. They even had some WWII fighter combat - machine gun against the fighters - on the Eiffel Tower.

But especially I enjoyed the Paris segments, like the Women's march, where you wound up in a very beautiful part of the map, a farming area - plus the "kill all the snipers" segment that was meant for coop play - I had to really get my strategy tight to keep Napoleon from being assassinated as I dashed about the roofs and streets to get all those bad guys.

I was able to replay some of those segments several times - maybe I was somehow able to create a save point - or maybe they allowed you to replay some segments, but not all of them.

I remember wanting to replay the one segment where you kill all the bad guys in the cornfield off of one street, and after several failures, I was finally able to do it by firing a hallucinating dart at one of their soldiers who was nearby in a dead-end part of the fencing, while I was manning a nearby roof and shooting most of the enemies who attacked him. That was a very challenging segment - but for some reason, the type of mission it was would not allow me to replay it once I finally beat it.

=======================

Back to Syndicate, I just last night watched the old 2002 movie, Gangs of New York, for the first time. I have been meaning to watch it for a long time, having gotten the 720p video file maybe 5 years ago, but I picked it out last night because I thought the gangs might be similar to the Sundicate London gangs - and they were.

In fact I believe that Syndicate took a lot of ideas from Scorsese. The main Syndicate villain, Starrick, sure did seem to resemble the movie character Bill the Butcher, as portrayed by Daniel Day Lewis.

Happy Holidays everybody!

Rich

 

Hey Jeff,

I could go back a few pages but I'm pretty sure you have the nvidia 1070 8 gig graphics card. Support for crossfire and sli seems to be slipping, and the new cards are so powerful, only the real die-hard 4k users, it seems, would even need to mess with sli.

Having said that, I have no plans at all to upgrade from my perfect 2560x1600 dell 30" monitor that has served me very well for about 8 years now, and as far as I can tell, has no stuck pixels at all.

BUT - the new games don't support crossfire, and for example, Wolfenstein The New Colossus - which is a gorgeous game, has me playing at 1080p - and it won't even let me try at 1600p. I can't tell my framerate because it doesn't seem to support fraps - maybe I need a newer copy of fraps.

SO MY QUESTION TO YOU, AS A 1070 USER ...

As I start to think about buying an 8 gig 1070, are there any special considerations? Would I even need to think about over-clocking it and using a utility like trixx? Is there a version of fraps that will work with the latest games?

Any suggestion from you or Sam or anybody would be most welcome. Thanks

Rich

 

Rich, as far as sound gear and headphones go, it's all relative. If it sounds good to you then there's no argument, it sounds good. Most motherboard, receiver and smartphone audio chips these days produce very close to reference sound. My gear is more focused on reducing distortion and background noise, and providing clean power to headphones, than any real perceivable increase in the sound quality. Maybe helps with stereo separation a little.

That being said, I'm sure I have a few pairs of headphones that would really impress you when powered by this rig. My K712 Pros, T50RPs and HD599s have otherworldly 3D positioning. Great accuracy with HRTF headphone tests. Hellblade - Senua's Sacrifice is a newer game I purchased recently. It uses HRTF recording techniques for the audio, and recommends headphones for the best experience. So I figured why not use the BEST headphones? lol. Excellent work done by the sound team. Creepy effects all around you, whispering over your shoulder, positional audio cues that have you using directional sound to find the way forward. Next level stuff, all designed to leverage the power of stereo headphones. Using surround headphones it will use the generic 5.1/7.1 surround engine instead of the headphone specific HRTF stereo audio. A lot of the magic built-in to the original recording will now depend on your Medusa headphones to do the job, and they're not really an audio-centric company. That's why I wonder if the Medusas are up to the task. I remember when they came out they were pretty well reviewed and I seem to remember some of my friends having them and liking them. I didn't know the difference then so I thought they were pretty cool too. I've since discovered stereo is really the way to go for headphones. All the technology is built around stereo, despite surround headsets having distinct advantages. We only have two ears And many good stereo headphones can be had for cheap. My Philips SHP9500s are available for $70 and are truly excellent, and those House of Marleys for $30.

How did those House of Marley headphones work out for you by the way? I rather liked mine. Nice warm sound, smooth and non-fatiguing to the ears.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rich, The GTX1070 is a rock solid card. I have been able to play ALL of my games with good framerates at maxed or nearly maxed settings at 1440p. It's also highly efficient, at well under 200W even for my overclocked model. So it stays very quiet and I have never even seen it get hot. Rarely touches 70*C unless I leave a hardcore benchmark like Heaven on repeat overnight. The cooler is so efficient that more often than not, it turns its fans off and runs passively under 50*C. My case has rather strong direct airflow to the card as well, which helps with passive cooling. The fans are not running as I type this. Can't get any quieter than that

Its sheer raw horsepower has surprised me more than once. Sadly crypto-mining has kinda driven the price up and availability down. If you can find it around $400 it's a good deal but any higher and you might as well get a 1070Ti or a 1080. Or better yet, this generation is pretty old now so I've recommended to a few friends to stay with what they have and wait for the next generation. Anything you buy should be a large jump from those 7950s though. Good cards but let down by a severe lack of memory. They should have been 4GB or 6GB cards for sure. Same thing happened to my GTX970. That card could easily have been 6GB or even 8GB and used the memory fully.

As far as overclocking goes, I personally don't bother doing it manually unless I really NEED a few frames. I basically did it to bring my average from 58 to 62 in the Ghost Recon Wildlands benchmark. Get the highest clocked factory card you can, and the card will dynamically overclock itself to quite a high level automatically. At stock settings mine will turbo itself to nearly 2GHz from the 1595 stock clock. The cards do a good job at squeezing the last bit of juice out of themselves without any outside influence. If you do overclock, the large majority of 1070s will manage 1650-1700MHz stable on the core, and 8400-8600(4200-4300 doubled) on the memory. All with factory voltage. Those are very safe goals to aim for. Memory shows very little gain though so it's popular to leave the memory alone and just OC the core. Puts less lifetime wear on the card and saves a little heat.

Trixx is largely for AMD cards, and will have better support for those and their particular quirks. For Nvidia, MSI Afterburner has taken giant leaps in the last few years and is a much better piece of software than it used to be. I abandoned it years ago only to find it transformed when I started OCing my 1070. Very solid software now. Probably one of the best video card OCing utilities I've ever used.

As far as SLI and Crossfire support goes, it's about the same as it's always been. Games on certain engines and other less popular stuff not having Crossfire/SLI support until driver updates add it in, has always been a common theme. I waited 6 months to have HD6850 Crossfire in Metro Last Light, and by that time I just replaced my video cards. Yes, SLI and Crossfire are really only for the hardcore who really need ultimate performance. A single card does the job quite well these days. I just pointed a friend at a 1080Ti for his 1440p display and it's more than enough. Overkill he says. So if you need SLI 1070s, maybe look at a single more powerful card instead. It'll likely be cheaper, and have much more reliable performance.

Also, the 1070 is a good card, but the 1070Ti is available now, and it's even better. Much closer to say a GTX1080 than its 1070 little brother. If I were buying right now I'd want a 1070Ti

 

Hi Jeff,

Yes I did pick up two Marleys - I haven't tried them yet but they are in my room for when the time comes. I couldn't pass up that deal with your high recommendation. My Medusas do not put out the exquisite sound quality like the kind of headphones that you use - maybe I'll try the Marleys on an HRTF game and see if the surround sound effects work for me.

Regarding graphics cards, I actually plunged ahead two days ago and bought an Asus overclocked dual-fan white shroud 1070 from eBay. I did it shortly after reading that Assassins Creed Origins definitely will not be releasing a sli patch. At that moment I mentally abandoned my crossfire 7950s. That game - all that Egyptian stuff, looks really good, and when I finally get it, I don't want to run it in 1080p like I'm doing now with Wolfenstein 2.

I might sell these cards, but it's more likely that I will just hang onto as a fallback in case the 1070 goes bad. My favorite game, Arma 3, runs great with the crossfire 7950s, but occasionally I have to dial back to very high instead of ultra.

I will use your awesome post as a reference - for example regarding MSI Afterburner.

Also you mentioned running Heaven all night - should I do something like that? I want to really test this 1070 in the first couple of weeks to make sure it's a good card. The seller says it is running perfectly and that he only used it for a few months - he probably upgraded to the frozer 3-fan card, or maybe to a 1080.

He doesn't have any return policy, but eBay and PayPal might protect me if the card turns out to be bad.

Rich

 

Congrats Rich!!! That's awesome! It should be a massive upgrade in every way possible. Many of the games you have struggled with in the past should suddenly become very easy to run. My card has been perfect for 1440p gaming. For the record, my second GTX970 was an Ebay find and it worked fine. My current CPU and motherboard were also Ebay purchases and have been awesome since day one. If you ever wanna know my hardware setup BTW, all you have to do is log-in and it will show in my signature. You can also check personal details in my profile for a full list of all of my hardware.

Some games still won't do 60 with maxed settings. Ghost Recon for example. But I was able to get it working great with nearly max settings.It's way more demanding than most titles, and I still managed to complete the game with all the major eye candy turned on. You could probably do max if you wanted to, if you don't mind playing below 60. Otherwise, I can run most stuff maxed with vsync. And quite a few of my older games run amazingly with 4x DSR putting the resolution at 5120 x 2880. That would be 5120 x 3200 for your 1600p display. Quite a large list of games will run great at that resolution.

As far as stress testing, a couple hours of Heaven should be more than adequate to reveal any sort of stability or heat issues. All night stressing not really needed. Even when overclocking, Heaven is usually enough to show issues immediately. I'd run a couple runs of Heaven, and if it shows no artifacts or issues, the card is probably just fine.

 

Thanks Jeff!!

The card arrived yesterday, and it's beautiful.

I already checked my case, and of the four 6-pin power to the two 7950s, one of them is actually a 6+2 - so I'm all set up without needing an adapter.

Yes, for my own tastes, I don't seem to be that sensitive to lag, so 30 fps is fine for me - I probably will never turn on vsync (also because it can very slightly interfere with shooting as I recall - I seem to remember that Sam advised me to turn off vsync - when I used to play multiplayer, like CS GO, I think I noticed a slight shooting lag as the frame waited for the monitor refresh.)

On Wolfenstein, I was able to get the steam overlay to give me the frames - looks just like fraps but smaller and not yellow. In the Wolfenstein 2 courthouse fight - with all the AI trying to kill me - my frames were down in mid teens, like 15, 16, etc. and I had major lag. That was a very hairy situation that took a couple of hours to beat (the lag didn't exactly help, and in addition I didn't realize you could unmount the two gattling guns.)

When I finally get the 1070 up and running, I'll play that same fight and see what no-lag feels like, LOL.

I looked up 4x DSR and it sounds a bit like super-sampling. I just read about 5 minutes on it.

As you said not too long ago, Jeff, talking about your 1070 and running at 4k resolution - 4k is almost doable, so Sam wasn't really stretching that far.

A 4k monitor has about 8 million pixels - I'm running about 4.1 million right now - so that's about twice as many pixels, meaning a dpi of about 1.4 times my dpi, which I believe is about 100 dpi. When I play on this screen at native resolution - it seems quite detailed. So when we talk 4k, is that extra 140% higher dpi - going to be the huge wow factor that Sam was suggesting it is?

Sam said that even your non-4k resolutions look better, because you see more of the texture - more pixels of the non-4k texture map, because you're laying it on a 4k screen. He said the graphics IS DEFINITELY A WOW.

What do you think, Jeff - have you ever watched anybody play in 4k? Since these new cards are so powerful, now, should we all start thinking of moving up to a 4k monitor one day?

Rich

 

Good lord, Dell...
One of the most advanced monitors on the planet

 

That's exactly right - just what I was thinking about - a nice affordable 4k monitor.



Uhhhhh.


Wait a second -


8K. For over $THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS!!!

KEVIN HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND!!!

Rich

 

Just marveling lol
There is a plus side. New technology drives the cost of lesser technologies down. Heck, I've seen relatively cheap 4K displays. 2K (naturally) has come down as well.
I've recently come into even more money, that was not anticipated. With each passing day, I become more tempted lol
My credit is doing quite nicely. I've been seeing offers that could just allow me to make the upgrade, without breaking the bank.

Rich, are you getting updates via email? Because I'm not... lol

 

Hi Kevin,

Well, yes, I am getting updates via email. I don't know what I am doing right, but every once in a while they show up and I always take notice that somebody came along to participate in this old thread.

Did you happen to notice that I just joined Jeff in upgrading to a gtx 1070. I forget what Sam is gaming on, but he's taken the leap to a 4k monitor, so I would hope he is at least on a 1080.

Congrats about your "inheritance" showing up finally, lol. Or whatever it was. What hardware are you thinking of getting. You're right, 4k is reasonably affordable, and I read about guys gaming on 4k TVs - that is probably the way to get the cheapest 4k monitor - just get a 4k tv - they all have hdmi input, and displayport will carry an hdmi video signal - isn't that right?

The 4k sony tv (or is it a samsung - yeah that's what it is I think) that we have in the sunroom set us back only about $600 - it's a 48" I believe - a beautiful set. I guess I wouldn't mind gaming on that, but it wouldn't fit too well on my little trailer table.

Wait, I just googled 4k monitor, and there are a bunch going for around $400 - so they are cheap enough without getting a tv.

With my old overclocked 3.343Mhz 9450, 8 gigs of ram, and the new asus gtx 8 gig vram 1070, which dynamically overclocks up to near 1800 Mhz depending on gpu temp, with graphics maxed out on ultra, I am now getting 55-60 fps in Wolfenstein 2, and I was getting about the same in Dishonored 2 - Death of the Outsider DLC, when I tested it with the new 1070. I don't have vsync turned on, and I maxed all the graphics settings.

But wait - there is an uber setting in Wolfenstein, and I am on ultra. I should try that uber setting to see if that is beyond ultra - I guess it probably is. I might report back that my fps have dropped to 40, but that is fine for me.

Rich

 

Not big on $ony. Samsung is agreeable though. 1070 is definitely out of my price range at the moment lol
I do get "alerts" on the site itself, but no emails.
An HDTV could be a thing. I have been itching for something larger.
I've been going through my PC graveyard, and came across an 8GB PC3L 12800 module, an i5-4570t, a 1TB hard drive... all in usable shape. Each should fetch roughly $50 or more. There's a little bit more money not anticipated
They came from an HP Envy 23 all in one touchscreen PC. 2012-13 machine. Damned thing either has a corrupt bios, or motherboard. Lost cause... ultimately.

Been trying to piece together something for my Niece, without having to touch my secondary PC. I plan to turn that into a file server, since my external USB 3.0 dock is giving me grief. It's been fun here... lol! Another machine reached 75C, before I realized the CPU fan had failed!!! Touched the heatsink, and it was VERY hot. From what I read, the CPU can take it though. But it's a Pentium 4 with HT(rather old). I essentially call it a dual core. Probably be lucky to get $5 for it.

Oh, I can't wait to sample 4K...

Edit: Disabled, then re-enabled email notifications. As simple as this sounds, I hope it works lol

 

For your niece, maybe a used core 2 duo tower on eBay. The ones I like are the compaq DC5800 microtower (not the version that lays down horizontally - the version that is a tower.)

CHEAP EBAY CORE 2 DUO TOWERS AT 70-80% SPEED OF NEW TWO-CORE, FOR UNDER $100
I have picked up three of those machines, compaq dc5800, dual core, 4 gig memory, over the past 3 years, for under $100 each, on ebay, on the Buy it Now price, free shipping.

I have become very familiar with the workings of that DC5800 tower, and I have all the xp and w7 drivers. After getting the first one for a friend, and putting xp and w7 on it, trying out windows 7 XP mode and seeing how good it was - I then upgraded my own desktop from an old pentium to one - that's what I'm typing on now - and then when the phenom in the kitchen went out, I bought another - about $89 for that one. The first two came with vista - I upgraded them to w7 ultimate. The third came with w7 pro - I left that on there.

I see one on eBay right now for $63.90, free shipping, 4 gigs ram, 80 gig hdd, optical dvd reader, vista (but I can steer you to dirt-cheap w7.) That's what I mean. https://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-Compaq-...323334?hash=item25e0623886:g:7R4AAOSwLApZv9xu

The tower takes two sata hard drives, two more sata ports for optical, and it will support an ide floppy. Sata will not support Raid - it's first-level sata in ide mode. So I don't run Raid any more - what I run is acronis 2014 partition differential backup scheme - it wakes up the dc5800 from sleep each week at 3:00 am, and runs the backup. I backup both my xp and my w7 partitions. I made a recovery cd and tested it, the resulting partition backup worked as good as a clone. So I also don't do disk cloning as often - maybe once each 6 months - and rather than a clone for every machine, in some cases I keep only a partition backup for every machine - fewer hard drives sitting around.

It has on-board sound, 2 front and 4 back usb ports, on-board 10-100-1000 ethernet, one full-size pci-3 graphics slot (and I run a $35 6450 hdmi card, vga, dvi and hdmi) plus several pci-e 1x slots, and a pci slot.

On my desktop I run a pci-e 1x sil 3132 2-port hot-swap esata koutech card giving me two more hot-swap esata ports, which also supports a hot-swap power-over-esata plug using a sata power to floppy power connector (it needs floppy power for the power part of the power over esata cable) - which I used to use more when I did more hdd testing. So other than the lack of Raid support, it does allow for extra special purpose expansion cards.​

But now with the Acronis backup, if I do any sata hdd testing, I usually just do it on the gaming tower. I have an esata in the front of my gaming tower, and two more long sata cables, plus an $12 A/C to dual sata power adapter, so I just lay the hard drives on top of my gaming computer to allow them to cool from the 200mm ceiling exhaust fan while I do whatever testing, like HDTune full error scan. Nothing is hot swap, so I have to re-boot each time. ​

For HDD cooling on the DC5800 I always put a small 80 or 92mm fan behind the disk drives to cool them down, parallel with the front of the tower - they get a little air through the cracks in the hdd casing and it's good enough and way better than no fan at all - and I run HDSentinel to see disk temps in the system tray, right now at 32 and 35.

My brother had paid $700 for that phenom about 5 years ago at Frys, but when it went out I just pulled up eBay and got the third refurbished dc5800 (as I said, not the horizontal ones, the tower ones) for about $85 or so, which are faster per core than the phenom was - it was at 330 but 4 cores, these are 360 but two cores (I use an avi-to-mkv converter for the speed rankings.)

Each core is probably about 60% of the speed of my overclocked gaming computer, core for core, but the gaming has 4 cores, and these are 2 cores. They are 80% of the speed of a 3-year old 2-core i3 that a relative has in LA, running 360 fps compared to about 435 fps on an avi to mkv converter for the LA machine.

Rich

 

75*C? Sounds like normal operating temps for a Pentium 4

Yes Rich, DSR is essentially a form of supersampling. You turn it on, and it adds an extra resolution to your game menus which you can then select as if you had a higher resolution monitor. Older games might need the new higher resolution forced through an ini setting, or a patch. However most games will simply show the new resolution and go.

I recommend using a quad/4x resolution, because it scales perfectly cleanly and gives the most benefit. It also doesn't need Nvidia's "smoothing" setting so you can set the slider for that to zero. This is where I get 4K out of a 1080p display. 4K is a perfect "quad" of 1080p. For my 1440p monitor the resolution for 4x is even higher than 4K, 512o x 2880, which is more like 5K.

When using DSR, you can disable other forms of antialiasing to save performance, as it looks FAR better than traditional AA anyway. However if you have enough performance headroom, you can enable AA as well which will give an incredibly clean image. Particularly post processing AA like Temporal, FXAA, TxAA, etc all benefit from the use of DSR because it increases the resolution of the effect and reduces the inherent blurring. Post processing AA is technically a shader, and its biggest weakness is that it's limited to your rendering resolution. So DSR is a gigantic upgrade, especially for Temporal AA. However most games with those effects are new enough where DSR isn't really practical to run, win some lose some.

Now to scaling. If you scale at less than 4x, it will not downscale back to your display cleanly. Blurriness, hard to read text, and uneven edges among other things. This is why Nvidia introduced the "smoothing" setting alongside DSR. It's workable, however it's really a band-aid solution for using the technology improperly. 4x is the only way to get the true benefit. Otherwise, you will get a much cleaner and better image using good old-fashioned AA. As a rule of thumb, if I can't run a game at 4x DSR, I don't bother with DSR. Big performance hit for a questionable benefit.

The only downside to DSR is if the UI scales to the resolution and has no option to increase the size. In particular you will have a teeny tiny barely usable UI, with barely legible text due to the tiny size. Most games keep their UI intact when you scale the resolution though. Worth noting that this is also a problem for owners of real 4K displays too. I'm sure Sam can attest to that. You need something like a 47"+ display for 4K to be usable in some games.

A great game to try DSR in is Left 4 Dead 2. It really makes the textures pop, and the zombies are so individually sharp and clear. You can see every glistening detail on the flying gore. Turn Vsync on for extra silky smoothness. Whether Vsync adds input lag or not is really down to the game and engine. Some games are just beautiful with Vsync and others are a bit laggy so I turn it off in those. Source Engine is historically pretty well behaved with Vsync in most cases.

 

Jeff, I was certainly surprised to see that's not a concerning temperature lol
Something smelled hot, when I unplugged it, but am reasonably sure the CPU is fine. Though I would probably not get much more than gold scrap for it.

Interesting, Rich. If it weren't HP, I might consider it lol
This HP Envy 23-k027c has been a moderate nightmare. But!!!... I figured out that the keys/secure boot were the problem. Unless I misunderstood something, windows 8.1 REQUIRES secure boot to run. And if the keys are corrupted, screwed(lest HP support). I wiped the hard drive(though I can't wipe the HP-SSD containing recovery software).
I was sure that the bios/uefi must be corrupted, since it was hanging the way it was. But I changed boot, to boot from flash drive. Then it occurred to me that it wasn't completely hopeless. Then was able to change Legacy bios, disabled secure boot, and windows 7 can boot from internal hard drive. I'm about to try out Windows 10, and see what all the hype is about.

In a way, I'm sad to see the computer is fine. I can no longer sell the components. As I've already promised it to my niece.

And still not getting email updates...

 

Hey Kevin,

Envy - isn't that a cell phone?

Don't mind it - it's really Compaq - I call mine the richcompaq - yeah I know HP bought Compaq but it's a good piece of equipment, I promise!! Keep the Envy and get her the $63.90 compaq!


Oh, okay, Jeff, so input lag with Vsync depends on the game. Some games don't have the lag, some do.

Well, I don't seem to see any tearing - either my eyes just don't see it, or the monitor doesn't display it - so I just normally leave the Vsync off.

DSR - IS IT IN THE NVIDIA CONTROL PANEL, OR GAME OPTIONS, OR BOTH?
Well, DSR sounds really cool - does Wolfenstein have that? Let me google. Oh - it looks like maybe you enable DSR in the nvidia control panel - is that correct? I thought before that you said it was a game setting.

So - in the nvidia control panel, you enable DSR - but then you tell the game to display 5120 x 3200 (in my case.) Is that correct? I didn't see that resolution listed in the 16:10 aspect ratio offerings.


So am I right - for DSR you do something in the nvidia control panel, then you adjust resolution in the game?

I do own Left 4 Dead 2 of course. I don't play multiplayer anymore, but I could run it single player with bots and give the DSR a try so I could learn how it works. That might be a good thing to do - it sounds great.


On Wolfenstein, the quality presets go from ultra to uber to Mein Lieden (my life) but as I see, when you set the ultra preset, most of the advanced settings show ultra. When you go from there to the uber preset, one or two of the 10 advanced settings is turned up a notch, and when you go from uber to mein leden, as I can see, only the AA goes from next-to-best, to the best AA which is SMAA(T8) - something like that. I honestly can't tell the difference between the two AA settings. There are 7 AA options, from disabled to that last one, and I have taken screenshots in a couple areas showing all 7 - but once you get past disabled (where the game still looks really good) to the most advanced AA, it is super hard to see the difference.

I am so glad that I can play in native resolution now - I was missing so much quality playing at 1080p. The difference is amazing. Same thing on the Dishonored 2 DLC, Death of the Outsider. The game was 3X more beautiful when I went back in to test the 1070 - I'm sorry I played all through it on the one 7950.

I guess 4k, at about twice the pixels, meaning 1.4x the dpi, would be even more definitive, versus my current resolution, but again, I don't know if my eyes would really be able to tell the difference.

So, let me ask again:

HAS ANYBODY OTHER THAN SAM SEEN SOMEBODY PLAYING ON A 4K MONITOR - AT 4K?

I think I might eventually post all 7 screenshots, putting the shots on my own web site host so I can preserve the 2560x1600 - for your very discerning eye, Jeff, and then you can tell me if you see a quality difference. The other thing is that there seems to be no impact on fps - I am still running close to, or over, 60 fps no matter what I choose.

The one problem, however, of leaving the game set on that final AA setting, is the the game crashes on re-load. When I re-load the game, I have to go to options and take it off that last AA and put it on the next-to-best, or the game won't load - it pops me back to the desktop. I initially thought my card was acting up, but then google showed me that a million people had problems with wolfenstein 2 at first before the patch.


I THINK I NOW LIKE DUAL WEAPONS!
By the way, Wolfenstein 2 gameplay is pretty great, and I am doing something that I didn't do in the first Wolfenstein - I am using dual weapons - one in each hand - Max Payne uzi style. I created a save point to practice with, and I have slaughtered all those combatants, and been slaughtered myself about a dozen times, trying the various combinations.

I used to think it used up too much ammo, but I have massive ammo capacity now, so not so much of a problem. Double assault rifles really tear through most enemy armor, and double shotgun really cuts them up if they are in shotgun range - double smg is pretty potent too.

Or how about auto shotgun with expanded 40-round magazine in one hand (ammo capacity 240) assault rifle with double-60 round clips in the other (ammo capacity 330.) I can spam the shotgun and catch the enemies coming out of the door just a few feet away, and at the same time swing 5 degrees to the right to pinpoint the enemies coming from the room 30 meters distant with the assault rifle. I have one New Orleans mission save point just to play that one situation, trying out different weapon combinations.

I usually roll with the double assault rifles, but even the SMGs (90 round expanded clips, total capacity 495 rounds) two-handed, have massive impact, unless they are out of range, like beyond 35 meters. When you hold down both mouse buttons, the SMGs fire so fast, they plaster the enemies up against the wall or just throw their arms back until they instantly drop - they are really effective in CQB situations, particularly against un-armored enemies like those nasty uzi wielding scientists, and even against armor unless beyond the 25-30 meter range.​

My one gripe about grenades (the gripe: my mouse throws middle-mouse-key grenades if I turn fast) can be handled by having the grenade launcher in my left hand, where the right mouse button controls it, and an assault rifle in my right hand. I shoot with assault rifle - left mouse - and pop a grenade off from time to time for the enemies coming from the distant room, with my right mouse button - the launcher holds a max of 11 grenades. Then if there is time to think - I can fire off 5 more hand grenades with my G key (I put shotgun back on the roughed-up 4 key so I can find it faster.)

SOMETIMES YOU MUST CARRY A ONE-HANDED WEAPON
The light mini laser cannon, however, is not two-handed - you only carry one of those, so it always loads in the right hand, controlled by normal left mouse. So in one scenario, where I am gunning for the commander, but there is a heavy around with double-mountable-laser canons who needs the laser treatment, I go for silenced pistol, then press they X dual key - now a silenced pistol in each hand. Then I press the key for laser cannon - he goes in the right hand.

So now, left mouse controls mini laser cannon in my right hand, right mouse controls silenced pistol in my left hand.

If I get to the commander before alerting the heavy, then I have to remind myself that I am now using right-mouse for pistol, so right-mouse headshots equals dead commander. I pick up the enigma key and I am done - if I happen to upset the monster then normal left mouse - hold for a second to build up charge - then release to fry the monster.

(I upgraded the mini laser cannon to unlock the burst buildup - very worthwhile laser upgrade - only takes two long burst buildups to take down the 800 armor - normal armor is 100 - fire-breathing large horse-size ride-able robot dog. Another save fights two of those dogs. I found that they can be killed with conventional weaponry - particularly dual assault rifles - but it take some time, like the tank in Left 4 Dead.)​

So carrying two weapons in that one situation is much better than trying to fumble for the 5 key when the monster gets alerted, lol. There is nothing like the fun of trying to find the correct gun key - even with the Saitek lighted keyboard - under the panic of a monster attack when the music goes nuts and the pain starts coming (which is why auto shotgun went back to the roughed-up 4 key.)

Rich
EDIT: yeah I looked up the DSR - nvidia control panel and maybe also geforce experience profiler. I will probably try it tonight - I might turn off AA to compensate if it works.