F.A.O. Lee and any other fellow geeks - planned Games Rebuild

[Munson]

I was just wondering if it's worth bothering with drivers etc for amy soundcard. I only use 2.1 so the new mobo should be more than good enough? I guess I should install my existing Audigy though really.

 

[Darren S]

It comes down to your speakers Roy. If like you say, you only use a 2.1 speaker setup then I'd consider something like an X-Fi card to be a bit of a luxury, imo. If you're fortunate enough to have a full blown surround sound setup - 5.1 and upwards, then the X-Fi Fatal1ty really is worth it.

As wozzaa pointed out, there are several games that support it - and that list is growing larger. Civ 4 uses it (well, EAX4.0), as does Prey. BF2 has a specific 'Ultra High' audio setting that can only be applied when an X-Fi is detected. Both Doom 3 and Quake 4 have X-Fi support if I'm not mistaken, and so on..

D.

 

[wozzaa]

Why i bought mine as i have a surround sound setup made sense over the audigy 2 i had to get one plus i have my student loan at the time and £140 out of the £2000 i had to didnt seem so bad. the rest went on getting shitfaced and some bits for the car.

 

[Darren S]

Why i bought mine as i have a surround sound setup made sense over the audigy 2 i had to get one plus i have my student loan at the time and £140 out of the £2000 i had to didnt seem so bad. the rest went on getting sh*tfaced and some bits for the car.

Good lad, wozzaa....

D.

 

[Munson]

I'm more than a little bit pissed off. The case is defective and I cant do the build until it's been replaced :dead:

I've got all this new gear lying around and I cant build it

 

[Munson]

Ah fook it, I just ordered up one of these mofos so I'm not just waiting for the new case;

http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1958

And a tube of Arctic Silver of course

So I then decide to remove the OEM HSF and promptly rip the processor out of the socket :dead: Fortunately it's all fine and dandy.

 

[Munson]

Oh for fooks sakes!

Why didnt someone tell me that ATX2 was the new standard. My PSU doesnt fit the mobo

EDIT: WTF? It seems you can just plug the 20 pin into the 24 pin socket anyway. Is this true???

 

[Darren S]

I thought the last four pins were detachable (or at least, easily seperated) from the main block of 20pins?

Not having much luck so far, are you Roy?

D.

 

[Munson]

Mate, this build has been a real pig!

All done now though, just having a couple of corned beef and salad cream rolls with pickled onion Monster Munch, then a cup of tea and time to plug her in

 

[Lee]

Mate, this build has been a real pig!

All done now though, just having a couple of corned beef and salad cream rolls with pickled onion Monster Munch, then a cup of tea and time to plug her in

I've just had the same!! Although instead of monster munch I had chicken crisps and instead of tea, red bull!!

 

[Munson]

LOL

Silly question but its been a while. My copy of windows is very old, so do I update windows before installing all my drivers? Obviously I'll install some AV before plugging into the web.

 

[Darren S]

Is your copy of Windows legit?

Personally, I'd whack on SP2, then the directX update from April '06 and then install the latest drivers. Personally, I shove an old HDD in there and update the BIOS to the latest revision on any new mobo - giving the new & clean O/S the best start.

First driver - always the chipset before anything else. Then just the usual suspects - audio, gfx, etc. Some oddballs such as the ATi Catalyst Centre require .Net Framework v1.1 to be installed first, but the nVidia nForce ones don't.

I also disable as much unnecessary crap in BIOS as much as possible. Parallel ports, IR ports, floppy drive settings, etc. Free up as many resources as you can....

D.

 

[Munson]

Yeah it's legit. Just updating windows now.

 

[Munson]

Well I know this thread is getting boring now, even for the UberGeeks. But...

Stone the crows

The performance of this machine seems pretty amazing so far. I'm downloading '06 to bench it later on.

I've had a blast on Tomb Raider Legend (with next gen effects) and its easily averaging 40fps. TheBeast was crippled by the next gen effects but TheBeast2 runs it very slickly indeed, even with vsync on and maxium everything. Impressed with that.

Then I tried The Lost Coast video stress test and pulled 57fps with vsync (@60hz), 4xAA, 8xAF. Then I diasbled vsync to uncap 60fps and ran with 2xAA, 4xAF and pulled 105fps. This is all at 1280x1024 native.

Next up will be 3DMark'06 hopefully tonight, and Prey should be dropping on my doormat in the morning. Sweet.

I havent done any tweaking of any sorts yet. I will check out this AiNOS stuff over the weekend and start manually overclocking. One thing I am amazed with, is the noise level, or rather the lack of it. The 7950GX2 is near enough silent

 

[wozzaa]

Make sure you install the amd drivers.

And if you find you have certain games runnign too fast its usually a screw up with windows not assigning it to a core properly way to get around it is to set compatibility mode to win98. I had to do this for toca3, flatout2 and couple other games or they were unplayable due to running too fast time scale screwed up was like playing them at 5 times the speed.

And that 7950 will barely be getting pushed at those res's a single card will run the games at those res's so whack details up.

Prey is a rather fun game not very long only around 5 - 6 hours.

 

[Rasclart]

Cool is sounding sweet Roy

Rename it to The Mammoth rather than Beast 2

I wanna built a monster again

 

[Munson]

And that 7950 will barely be getting pushed at those res's a single card will run the games at those res's so whack details up.

For real mate, I cant currently up resolution, as 1280x1024 is my native, so I can just push up stupid levels of AA&AF with vsync and enjoy stupid frame rates

 

[Andy A]

Sorry can't reallly be bothered to read all this thread, but anything more than Dual Sli is pointless right now, especially Quad Sli, there are only a couple of games that have specified profiles to fully utilise the power of 4 GPU's.

It's better to wait until games manufacturers make games that are actually compatible with the high power setups.

 

[wozzaa]

The games themselves are compatibile due to the way SLI works its just no one other than those hardcore benchmarkers who just overclock will find them useful. I personally just wouldnt spend that much i spent a fortune on this comp right now but it was pretty much the best you could get when i got it. my graphics card was £475 alone. And that was only 8 months ago. it will last me a while but dont think i will spend that much on a system for myself again any time soon.

 

[Andy A]

The games themselves are compatibile due to the way SLI works its just no one other than those hardcore benchmarkers who just overclock will find them useful. I personally just wouldnt spend that much i spent a fortune on this comp right now but it was pretty much the best you could get when i got it. my graphics card was £475 alone. And that was only 8 months ago. it will last me a while but dont think i will spend that much on a system for myself again any time soon.

Correct, they are compatible, however if a game can't utilise a dual gpu graphics card then it will revert to using only one of the graphics cards gpu's, this ultimately will make it slower than an overclocked 7900gtx

 

[Darren S]

Correct, they are compatible, however if a game can't utilise a dual gpu graphics card then it will revert to using only one of the graphics cards gpu's, this ultimately will make it slower than an overclocked 7900gtx

Aye. The default clock speed of a 7900 is higher than a 7950 as well. You could argue that the 7950 has more 'headroom' to overclock then - as well as the whole dual-core aspect of it.

D.

 

[wozzaa]

Correct, they are compatible, however if a game can't utilise a dual gpu graphics card then it will revert to using only one of the graphics cards gpu's, this ultimately will make it slower than an overclocked 7900gtx

Incorrect it depends how you set the drivers up. You can have it set load so 1 card might at times handle 40% of whats on screen the other 60% etc it just means you get a higher average fps and are able to add more eye candy the cars will not revert to only 1 being in use.

 

[Munson]

We can wax lyrical about the technical bits and bobs all day, but you cant argue with 8016 '06 marks, on an initial piddly 5% AI NOS overclock

So glad I chose the 7950GX2, mainly because of the fps divider implications using vysnc. In other words, where it matters, in games, the extra power is helping the system keep it's head above water and maintain 60fps rather than dropping to 30fps. I dont think it will manage that with F.E.A.R. though somehow.

 

[Munson]

Aye. The default clock speed of a 7900 is higher than a 7950 as well. You could argue that the 7950 has more 'headroom' to overclock then - as well as the whole dual-core aspect of it.

D.

I've just realised the implications of what's being suggested. Are we saying that unless it's a specially coded game, the 7900 will be faster than the 7950? The 7950 isnt a dual core GPU, it's two cards literally screwed togther and attached with an internal SLI bridge. It operates effectively as an SLI pair but through a single PCIE bus. AFAIK this means it's basically just one big mutha of a video card that's 80% as fast as an SLI pair of 7900's, and a lot less expensive