The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

There are so many parallels between cars and computers I could probably spend 5 days typing all of them.

And yeah the 9800GT is old. It's literally an 8800GT. Not a single difference AFAIK.

 

Heat = degradation Unless of course you're talking Adamantium

 

Shaff: I'm well aware it's old tech, but not necessarily an old card because 9800GTs were sold up until quite recently.

 

Got her all ready. I must say I'm rather unimpressed though with the onboard 4200. Looks like Arcsoft Totalmedia Theatre 3 may be Nvidia biased. Video quality just got very bad with that player with hardware acceleration. Disabling it helps a lot, but there is still slight artifacting. Thankfully MPCHC works the way it should I plan to do more testing when its actually hooked up to HDMI and his HDTV.

But even the desktop looks fussier via VGA then it used to. I know this comes across like i'm an Nvidia fanboy, but TOTALLY not LOL!

Doesn't get much more cramped then this! Though It can. An optical drive would be interesting. And one day, it may have a bluray drive. I didn't realize what a prick hooking the F_panel up would be. It resides under the Hard drive cage. I did it after slipping the board in LOL! That was challenging. But I was determined. Looks like gigabyte is shipping blue Sata cables now eh? The ones that came with are similar to the board color. Fitting I suppose

By the way, it's near silent. Even sam would like it

 

Old IGP will be dedicated analogue video, rather than digital to analogue conversion, which often results in artifacts. You shouldn't still be using VGA, it's a major quality loss.
Blue S-ATA cables is news to me, they were yellow with my P55A-UD4.

 

HDMI is impossible with my current hardwares. My monitor only supports DVI and VGA. My 8600GT doesn't cause artifacting like that via VGA. Not sure why that is yet. I plan on running over to his house momentarily, and getting to the bottom of this.

 

Use DVI, it's actually marginally better than HDMI.

 

To have used DVI, I would have had to disconnect my primary. I'm lazy see...

 

Oh I see, I tend to assume two PCs = two monitors

 

Soon enough. Soon, and I'll have that 24" dell we've talked about. Though I don't think that has HDMI either... Dvi will suffice though

 

Sam,
OK, I'll ask where are the blue Sata cables. All I see in the pic are red ones????

Russ

 

i'll bet omega changed the picture, the post was edited. Its a conspiracy to discredit samm...

 

LOL!!! Here they are. I didn't see the need to change out the already working red cable And I edited to say the following:

"By the way, it's near silent. Even sam would like it"

 

What's silent, the integrated graphics? You're not surprising me there!

 

3 fans. The CPU being the weakest link LOL! It is near silent though. In a decent size living room, they're not gonna hear it. Excellent!

By the way. The blue cables resemble the PCI E slot more so than the board.

 

Sam mentioned some good points but my reasoning is simply that under normal use the stock cooler should be sufficient to keep the card from dying prematurely. With that being said I did a fair bit of folding on my OC'd 8800GTS with stock cooler (it's been past 100C in the summer) and it was running fine last time I checked so I'm not really concerned about a gpu failing during it's useful lifespan due to heat.

 

I doubt manufacturers build things to last forever. Or even close for that matter. Some of us get lucky, and are stuff lasts a decade+. A stock cooler usually is sufficient. In my opinion though, 100+C is ridiculous heat! Boiling point is unnerving to say the least. Personal preference to be sure. If the card can supposedly handle it, than so be it. I'd prefer lower temps myself.

Everything seems to be running fine now on the HTPC with the new board. Unfortunately, I can't find anything within ati/catalyst software to correct for the overscan. Where I could with Nvidia, I cannot with ati. I know that sounds bad, but that's the way it looks at the moment.

 

Overscan adjustment settings in the display section. Not difficult to find

 

I'll look again today. I was drinking a bit last night. I did try multiple settings to no avail though...

Edit: could it be the refresh rate???

Looks like another typical Gigabyte problem though. The Kingston 16Gb Flash drive is still slow to respond on the new board (About 60sec). I still find this highly weird. The MSI acknowledged it in under a second. Also the MSI installed windows 7 highly rapidly(15min). Where as all my Gigabytes take upwards of 25-30 min. Sure wish Gigabyte would shed light on this. The only logical explanation is that the kingston has some unique chip on its board, which is unusual to the acknowledgment process for gigabyte boards. Or at least something on the gigabyte boards, which requires revision

 

Installing windows is slow on most boards due to a bug with the I/O setup of windows vista, which they didn't fix in 7.
Not recognising the drive for 60s is weird though.