The Official PC building thread -3rd Edition

Hey all - a little bit of a delayed reaction since I had to catch up on 10 missed pages of thread - holiday relatives, and all. I hope everybody is partaking of the general atmosphere of holiday cheer, and counting our blessings - I know that greensman is. (Happy birthday again Greenie - just kidding - I know that was over a month ago, but I forgot to post on the actual day.)

Russ, getting back to that discussion about fan noise, which is definitely on-topic for this thread, I find it fascinating that you play a giant pipe organ (and also that your synthesizer comes so close to duplicating the sound right in your room.) I would say that kind of heavy musical involvement gives a lot of credibility to your assertion that benches are one thing and not the only indicator of real-world computing, as in your discussion about that entry-level AMD board with impressive on-board graphics, of about a month ago, and your description of the superb quality of the video rendering. (By the way, how's your AMD thread doing?)

Anyway, although I find that you guys often disagree - (AMD versus Intel) - you and Sam must be among the most discriminating posters here regarding subtleties of graphics and sound. That's pretty much why, until Sam tells me to jump ship, I'll follow him in ATI fanboyism - (even though Nvidia CUDA folds faster than dozens of cpus combined - when I start folding I'll pay attention LOL) - I've seen his side by side game screen shot comparisons. Also when Sam tells me the Tempest moves a lot of air, quietly, that recommends that case highly. (That was a very interesting full tower bottom-inhaling case somebody posted linking to a russian web page a week ago - although I'm not sure I want a full tower for the future new build - size and weight considerations - a new coolmaster as I recall.)

Back to your musical interests, Russ, I bring up the pipe organ, because unlike some of our friends from Florida, or across the waters, I am right here like you in the OC. If you don't mind telling me, where do you play, somewhere like the Crystal Cathedral in GG? I have a musical background myself - clarinet and oboe - which hopefully contributed to my "good ear" for foreign language pronunciation (I'm working on Spanish.) I wouldn't mind "catching you in the act" one day - is it a church somewhere around here?

Happy holidays to all, Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah, Happy Ramadan, did I miss anybody (yeah all of Asia lol.)
- Rich

 

I'll be honest with you Rich, while the ATI vs nVidia Image Quality issue still exists, it's far more slight since the GTX260's release, in certain games such as Far Cry 2, there's no discernable difference between the two at all. In games like Crysis, the differences still remain, however, and I still recommend ATI cards, for one because they still work out cheaper, and for two because the control set for the cards isn't so limiting in terms of what you can do with the rendered image (I discovered recently that geforces basically have no mipmap control options at all)

There are full towers and then there are full towers. Some are only 'full tower' because of their height, others, it's the whole lot. Genuine full towers are absolute monsters, and a pain in the arse to even slide, let alone transport.

 

Thanks Sam - somewhere in the dim recesses of my brain mip map resides along with pow. But I'll take your word for it.

Yeah, the tempest is virtually a full tower, comparing it to a YouTube HAF review I watched - like maybe a half inch narrower, one inch less deep, one inch less tall. I have it written down somewhere. But it still seems like plenty of room for me - way bigger than my present mid tower - so I'm sure probably big enough.

By the way, what do our Pakastani Moslem buds celebrate - was I right about the Ramadan?
Rich

 

The Tempest is a lot smaller than real full tower cases, I assure you.

 

I'd say if u want raw power on the gfx side, the new forthcoming GTX295 is what you will want . I may sell my 4870x2 for it.

Creaky, as for ram my personal recomendation will be what I bought. For £75, 2x2GB Geil Black Dragon PC8500 1066MHz. they have no heatspreaders yet I can run them at 1150 with it getting barely hot to the touch under 2.25V and they have pretty lights LOL. But if your not OCing PC6400 2x2gb of OCZ or Corsair can be had for under £40

 

Given that the HD4870X2 surpasses GTX260 SLI in a few titles, I'm not expecting too much. If there were two 280s in there, maybe I'd have a different idea... The thing's likely to cost like £450 though, so I'm still not interested.

 

Shaff, let's face it - the only reason you are hung up on that memory is the red LED's. But other than you, who is ever going to keep the door open all the time so they can admire the brightly lit dragon eyes? (I kid - MUHAHAHAHAHAHA!)

Was I right about Ramadan?

So Sam, you're telling me that even the HAF full tower, is not really a FULL FULL tower, like that bottom-inhaling coolmaster with the big knob in front - very nice looking case by the way. In any event, Tempest is roomy enough, so you're right, space is a little limited, and extra portability could come in handy. Soon I'll post pics of my "custom tempest" very small mid-tower. I'm so proud, but I will NEVER try to cut holes in a steel case again - it's absolute hell!! LOL (one more reason for aluminum - kuddos to shaff and lian-li.)
-Rich

 

I think the HAF may be a full size full tower job, but cases like the Chieftec Dragon aren't.

 

Hmmmm. Well, that's confusing then - because I was taking the measurements from the YouTube video reviews on the HAF, and on the Tempest. The first part of each review laid out the exact measurements. The Tempest mid-tower was very very close to the HAF on all measurements. Remember those posts on the graphics thread where I said the Tempest is a full tower in mid-tower clothing?

Changing the subject: Edge Detect This will be of interest to anybody planning a new build for serious gaming.

I just went looking for the HAF and Tempest case measurements - couldn't find them but came up with something else regarding video cards. I keep a text file called "New Build" with snipets from these threads and everywhere else regarding components I am thinking about getting. I stumbled across some newegg reviews on the 1 gigabyte 4870.

The reviewer was shocked with the difference between the 1 gig 4870 and the 3870 he had upgraded from (mine now is the even weaker 3850.) At the same resolution he felt he could see farther and with more detail on cod4 online - obviously handy for spotting enemies - that of course, from the graphics thread, is a game I am playing a lot of lately. Then he read on hardforum about edge detect, which added to custom AA 24x turned everything super crisp!

Anyway, what do you, Sam, or estuansis, or anybody else, know about edge detect?
Rich

 

Personally I don't use it, as it always seems to come hand in hand with ridiculous levels of AA, and in DX9 at least, it's hard enough to see the difference between 4x and 8x, let alone 8x and 24x. The performance drop is certainly there though. With 24x AA applied, even two HD4870X2s can drop into the low 30s for considerable periods of time when the game is maxed out. Even 4xAA is a struggle (at least for one X2 at 2560) on the multiplayer map Wet Work, due to the Anti-Aliasing effect applied to the rain.

 

I've been experiencing a bunch of computer woes, the last couple of weeks. I finally received the answer today, when it reset and refused to boot because the config was corrupt. Worse yet is no matter what I did, I could not install XP-Pro SP2 on it because I would get all sorts of error messages for drivers it couldn't copy. I had to go back to my original non-SP version and then install SP2 and SP3 for it to install properly. They also corrupted my AVG 8.0 files and I had to download a new one and install it. The next time I'll take a closer look before I click on a link! LOL!! I certainly didn't expect it, and thinking it was an advertising banner, I accidentally clicked on a link from "popunder.ru", something I won't ever do again. It seems AVG found it, it just found it too late!

So far it's running great, as I brought it back up to 3.4GHz, where it was when it died. So far So good!

Russ

 

So the ruskies were trying to sabotage things for ya, huh!

 

It will be interesting to see what the new GTX295 brings to competition and the rumor mill has it that ATI is not far behind with a new upgrade as well.

I'm expecting that the GTX295 will essentially be the same as the current GTX2XX cores on a smaller die. What's going to hurt ATI has nothing to do with gaming but rather folding. Thanks to Nvidia's CUDA drivers Nvidia has the edge in folding. When I folded with the HD 3870 I was getting about 2700PPD which was easily beaten by a lowly 8800GS which got about 5000PPD on the same core. The result is that folders are snapping up Nvidia 8800 and 9XXX cards for folding. Donald has something like 6 or 7 alone.


Forgot the link:

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/020/1050020/ati-s-hd-49x0-coming-soon-ish

 

Interesting read. I'm not much bothered by the GTX295, as it will be an overpriced SLI card. Before, when SLI cards were better than anything else out there it was perhaps worth paying £400+VAT for them, but not this time, not when the almost identical HD4870X2 can be had for barely any more than £300+VAT. Because of this, the fact that the HD49xx is not going to arrive shortly does not surprise me. It is not going to be a rival for the GTX295, it is going to be a rival to either an upgraded GTX280 (perhaps 285 or 290?) or nothing at all until the GTX300 appears, which I would expect to be the latter half of this year, much like the supposed HD5800 series.

 

I'm sure Itll easily best the x2 and if so it'll be the most powerfull card out. Most x2s are north of £350 so £400 wouldn't be bad. Remember the 4870x2 is better then cf 4870s by about 5-10% so I'm sure this will be better than the gtx260(216) sli and surely it'll beat the gtx280 sli esp If it's got 480 cores (240 each gpu like the gtx280)

 

Well, the GTX260 SLI doesn't beat the HD4870X2 by any reasonable margin, so why should the 295?

The GTX295 may have 480 Shader processors, but it's still made of 260s, which will have a lower core, memory and shader clock. Ultimately I think the best we can expect is 3/4 of the way between the GTX260 SLI (original) and GTX280 SLI, which offers a boost of 20% at best in Crysis Warhead over the X2, and slower in STALKER Clear Sky.

 

Why's it going to be slower clocks? It's 55nm cores, less heat bigger clocks... Plus the gtx280 55nm refresh is about 10% faster than the 65nm and has only 2*6pin pcie connectors. I hope this comes as 10%+ faster than the x2, in gta, it'll be good for prices and if I can sell the x2 in time I may only have to pay a little bit more for it.

 

I'm going to take a wait and see attitude on this, there is far too much speculation over matters like these, everybody thought the GTX280 was going to be more powerful than it actually turned out to be. Not saying it won't happen, but unlike you, I just don't think this is going to be an HD4870X2 killer. I think it's more likely that the 55nm refresh of the GTX280, if suitably priced, could seriously harm the HD4870 range, especially if it drops the price of the GTX260 216. nVidia brute-forced their way through the benchmarks for that card by putting out significantly overclocked versions - the HD4870s overclock incredibly well too, but are always benchmarked stock. Given that the HD4870X2 has far less overclocking ability, one wonders how the GTX295 will get on.

 

Actually it turned out about as powerful as everyone expected. What they didn't expect was ATI's incredibly successful response with the 4XXX series which diminished the GTX280 for shear value.

 

Hmm, while the GTX280 is still a very nice card, I'm pretty sure it was forecasted to be to the 8800GTX what the 8800 was to the 7900GTX, which wasn't the case. It's maybe 70% better I'd guess, far from the 100% plus difference the 8800 had from its predecessors (excluding the 7950GX2 of course)