The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

My house experimented with this, there doesn't seem to be any magic bullet, other than to cap everything low enough to not cause any issues. I cap firefox downloads by using FlashGet to download them for me instead.

 

Does this allow you to surpass your usual download speeds???

 

No, it means I can limit download speeds so as not to affect latencies for online gaming.

 

OH, well I PMd you anyway. That's a good idea though. One thing this line is great for is online gaming. I usually have a constant <70 ping in most games.

 

I know that my DSL provider controls access by giving me two MAC addresses to register with. However everything goes through the wireless router and when I torrent everyone on the system notices. I don't see how the ISP could possibly supply computers behind a router with individual bandwidth, all they would see is the router and it would look just like a PC.

Using an ethernet HUB with different PCS MAC addresses register I could start to guess how that would happen, but i'm thinking that it might be a possibility that the torrents on your one computer just lock that one machine up because of half-open ports or whatever.

I'm interested into looking into this more. This is a problem I have as well and if there was a solution with my ISP as well it would help out a lot.

 

LOL

Amazing how a simple comment can lead to such an in-depth discussion.
Forums rock!!

BTW, what factors affect your ping if two people are in the same city???

Because a friend of mine has a normal 1MBPS ADLS connections and has a higher ping (he has less lag) than my other friend who has a 1MBPS WiMax connection (which works using wireless signals)
I wonder why???

 

They don't, it is solely torrents they limit, it's not done on a per-machine basis, it's done on a data-type basis.

 

I got the asus eah3450 hdmi graphics card to use as a secondary card in my desktop to run only to my tv and not the monitor. When I install the card and restart the computer, the monitor wont work correctly, it has power and everything but no picture except the monitor test screens. Does it have to do with the clip on the end of the pci express strip?

Thanks

 

You need to set which graphics adaptor your PC sends the picture to in the BIOS.

 

Another issue too: when I run the installation program, it comes up with: the video capture device has not passed windows logo testing to verify its compatibility with windows xp. It says on the box that it is compatible but just wanted to check with you guys before proceeding. Thanks for the help.

 

Ray: other way round, the higher your ping is, the less lag you have. ping isn't really much to do with speed, it is dependent on how far you are from the server you're connecting to, how many connections have to be made in between, how responsive your ISPs servers are, and how responsive the website (or gameserver) you're connecting to is.

jb: That's fine, lots of drivers give that warning, nothing to be concerned about.

 

K
Thanks for that sam, so higher ping=better gaming

Also, I just tried CoD4 Multiplayer on Lan and it was wicked fun, wish I had DSL right about now

 

No, higher ping = worse gaming.

 

I thought a lower ping meant better gaming. When I'm lagging out, my ping is like 400. But when I'm running smoothly, my ping is like 67, which is most of the time. Isn't your ping the latency between your actions on the keyboard and on the server?

 

I think he meant lower the ping the better the connection. Your bandwidth or download speed is 'how thick your pipes are' while ping is how quickly the data in the pipes flow. Ping is measured in milliseconds so a ping of 250 is 1/4 of a second which is alright, <100 is ideal. If you think of it like plumbing you can still be getting a large amount of water (kb/s) if the water is moving very slowly through the pipes (high ping) if the diameter of the pipe is two feet wide. So it's fine for downloading files, but with games where there is a lot of back/forth data transfer ping is more important.

For the DSL stuff I'm on a 6mb/1mb line where I realistically get more like 5mb downloads (650k/s). If I have my torrents running it bogs the network down to the point where people on other machines can barely use an internet browser so I can only run utorrent when I'm the only one of the system. I'm going through Telus which at the moment does not throttle torrents, but even if they did I'm running with encryption anyways so it can't be that. The other odd part is that for the vast majority my d/l speed is brutal for my connection. I usually get around 60k/s, lucky to get 100k/s even with a ratio >1. The odd times with a torrent that has a ton of seeders and no leachers I might get 250k/s but nowhere close to my actual bandwidth. And the oddest part of it all, is that even if I'm only getting 40k/s d/l from my torrents, my whole network still goes to the crapper.

I'm running Vista 64-bit ultimate, using a DLink DIR-655. I've tried messing with the router, with vista, with torrent clients, and half-open TCP ports. I still can't get it to function like it should, but if I could get the other people in the house on a 2nd connection that would at least not make my problem theirs.

 

Thanks for the help, but Im not sure how to do this, I should do this before actually installing the card right? I dont think it will let me go to the bios screen when I do put it in the pci express. Thanks again.

 

If I'm reading this right you can't get into the BIOS through either display? What is your PSU wattage?

 

Yeah, even if you don't have drivers installed, you should still be getting an image on your PCI-E card.

I also say check your PSU, and make sure you have the card fully in the slot.

Exactly. That's why this 768k connection isn't so terrible. It's serviceable for downloads and perfect for online games. A 5Mb connection would be nice right about now though. My friend has my copy of Mass Effect and I wanna download and re-install it

 

Hey guys - I'm back!!!! (Like Freddy lol)

I just went through a week of techie hell - modded out my case to put top vent fan - it is VERY hard to cut out a hole in a steel case. There must be an easier way to do it lol.

Finally got 3dmark6 working again, came up with the amazingly brilliant idea of ...... downloading it again. Duhhh! That worked. Once loaded it accepted my old registration code. My new 3dmark6 is about 4820 - my old one was 2270. So my p4 rig is faster, but .... still is a little laggy if I try to max the airborne demo at 1600x1200. If I drop to 1280x1024, and accept medium textures and models, then it is acceptable at about 35fps average. Speaking of demos, I see you guys are all playing the L4D demo - cool!! - estuansis' new fav!

Guys, FINALLY, I'm convinced. I read everybody's comments, and although I will say this - I don't catch on fast - I HAVE FINALLY CAUGHT ON!!!

I'm going to let Ray have the honors of being the only one left with a p4! Hahahahaha!

(Ray do you want to buy my 3850 - you can have it for $75, but you pay for shipping - how much is shipping to SA - about $100??? hahaha By the way, do you want my p4 3.2 in the same box? What do you have now? I'm looking at your sig

So, after yo-yoing around about this, I am now reversing directions again! I installed the corsair 450 with 33 amps on 12 volt rail after some gentle prodding from Sam: "What are you, some kind of f**ing idiot!"

Good!

I bought the 3850 agp = Good! ... well actually Bad! ... not for pci-e.

Then I started reading about overclocking the p4, my next project, and when you change the fsb bus clock, it affects the sata controller unless your board allows you to set that independently (not my ms-7103 - I can't even find the sata controller in the bios - I was lucky the last bios flash at least finds the sata drive) and on some forums the guy lost his sata hard drive, so I took out the new sata, and put in a 160gig ide and cloned my 80gig to that one. Then I made plans to buy a $50 zalman cooler for the p4 - you have to remove the motherboard to install the cooler backplate - and $70 worth of memory.

Then this morning I saw the 4850 newegg special for $129 and I said

Boozer has a new look - one of those wild candid shots again! Why not. Hey booze, I have a question for you - I can get your old card, the asus 512mb 4850 from newegg for $129 - a special - free shipping. Should I do that, or get the 4870? Those are still running, what, like $300? Oh My God - correction: Asus 512 4870 $219 after rebate!!! So Boozer, Sam, Estuansis, Shaff - for the extra $100 is it worth it to get the 4870 - same memory, more processor units and shaders as I recall - a fair amount faster right?

I have finally decided to not get the 4870x2, mostly because I am sold now on getting Sam's monitor for the new build. Next Fall, the new build will include a quad core and the brand new 5870x6 which will drive that b**tch crysis to its knees!

YEAH YOU HEARD ME 5870x6 !!

FINALLY A CRYSIS-RAPING GRAPHICS SOLUTION COMING NEXT YEAR!!! Run Crysis on Sam's monitor at 2560x1600 ultra high everything maxed, in glorious color, and all currently known graphics effects!!! Time to start thinking about OC'ing the quad - the cpu is going to go back to being the bottleneck!!

Here's the scoop. Check it out guys. Sam correct me if I mess up: 4870 = 1 teraflop, 5870 = 1.5 teraflop. Right now we have 2 teraflops per 4870x2, which is HUGE. However Crysis is HUGER. Today's technology is not powerful enough to dominate Crysis at 2560x1600 - yeah for 1920x1200 the 4870x2 is playable fully maxed as proven by estuansis and sam. The new 5870 will be, like 1.3 billion transistors versus today's 965 million or so, smaller die - I think it was 45nm, less heat hopefully, and size-wise, form factor is narrower, and also thinner. One article speculated that you could put two on top of each other, and then, in terms of horizontal placement, because of the smaller width, you could fit three of those sets where now you can only put two 4870s, so three sets of stacked 5870 processors = 6 gpus on one board = 9 teraflops per board (cooled with liquid nitrogen lol)
-Rich

 

You'll have to forgive the ignorance, but how do I calculate the psu wattage?