Be Excellent To Each Other

This reminded me to look at my current MAME and see about updates.

The current (0.158) merged set of CHD's is 344GB and the Roms are 30GB or so

Waste of storage as around 10% of the CHD work properly. That said my current set is 360GB

I think I've only ever bothered with the CHD for Killer instinct and possibly Street Fighter 3. They both worked (if I remember rightly) but I'm glad I didn't bother downloading any more.

Hullo all!

Well, I've got my new PC and it's up and running. Just downloading a fancy Steam game to give it a good workout shortly.

However I have one problem, and you may scoff but here goes...

There's no VGA connection.

And having dug out a HDMI cable I have to say that it really gives some ugly jaggies to my photographs. They look more brittle and metallic and hmm. The VGA connection was a lot smoother to my eyes. And I don't think it's a matter of getting used to it either sadly, it does look a little wrong. I've made sure the HDMI's picture name on the menu of my Samsung SyncMaster 2333HD is set to PC for a smoother look, but it's still a somewhat off. SO.

Is there something I can do to alleviate this? I also hear that DVI-PC would look pretty much the same, as it too is digital, so I guess that wouldn't make any difference would it?

Sigh. Maybe I have to get a new monitor too. *Weeps*

Are you running the display resolution to match the graphics card/desktop resolution? You shouldn't have any jaggies.

Yes, I am. 16:9 on the Samsung settings, 1920x1080 native on NVIDIA card and desktop resolution. If you select HDMI with default name it over-sharpens horribly, but you can turn the sharpening down and change the settings to 'Fit' instead of 16:9 which I think cures the overscanning. But it still looks a little more messy than if I select the HDMI - PC name option.

Sorry Pete, but your photos always looked rubbish in anything higher than Duplo resolution.

We just didn't have the heart to tell you.

Well I just gave SR4 a spin, and man does it look beautiful. I've been playing on low settings in games with juddery rates for practically ever, it's quite incredible how things look maxed out - hurrah! And there were no jagged problems either. Of course, AA was running. Gosh, I new graphics had come a long way from trailers and screenshots, but to actually play fluid maxed out games... droool.

And now I've been rooting around in the NVIDIA display settings and have found some hidden sharpening features, turned them off, changed scaling to GPU and full screen and that seems to have helped a bit. Phew. Will have to investigate further with a variety of pics but at least its no longer eye-gougingly awful. It's going to take me time to get used to HDMI. Looks like it's just my record player that's the sole analogue survivor in my place, now. Wub.

VGA? Seriously? That's not even, like, digital or nothing. You should have already been using DVI for the last decade. Have you been using a CRT monitor as well? he said in his best haughty geek tone.

But seriously, VGA? Like, really?

If your photos only look good in VGA, then, umm.

Ask Mimi if you can borrow her knitting books.

Having to mess around in the NVidia drivers to address sharpening issues and scaling sounds very wrong to me, btw, although I did have to go there myself the other day to force video color to full dynamic range, because VLC for Windows looks wrong otherwise. I thought it was my IPS panel that was just being a bit extreme, but it turns out I've been looking at washed out video playback for a year when I could have fixed it all along. Oh well.

Yeah, I've always used VGA. Seriously, it looked alright on my Samsung, and I've always gone easy on the sharpening on my images. And it really was good enough for me. I honestly didn't think things could be sharper! But what do I know, eh? I still read things on paper and listen to Louis Armstrong 'plates'.

There's probably a reason buried somewhere as to the jaggy question. I'll have to take a second look tonight as it was late and I'd been staring at screens so long I was perhaps beginning to second guess myself. But the jaggies with the HDMI were definitely awful, with a mix of the gritty jagged halo effect of over-sharpening. Again, cured somewhat by the TV setting making HDMI: PC and making sure the computer isn't doing any over-sharpening outside of games by forcing manual zero sharpening in NVIDIA. It could be the pixel ratio and an overscan issue, I'm not certain if I've fixed that fully but I think I have.

So now the main difference seems to be the grain in photographs. Although less sharp the grain looked a little more pleasing in VGA, now it looks very slightly gritty. I think analogue looked faintly warmer too.

I'll have to run a Spyder colour calibrator again I guess, to make sure it's all right.

Does anyone else own the mighty Samsung 2333HD and run HDMI on it?

In summary on VGA: I KNO WHUT A' LIKES AN' I LIKES WHUT A' KNO.

I don't but people do.
http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/3133 ... ext-Blurry

It looks like it should be possible to get 1-to-1 pixel mapping, that thread should point you at what you need to do if you haven't already.

Oh, so you are using some sort of TV/monitor hybrid, then. Don't know much about that, but I would suggest looking for some way to force the TV into PC mode when using HDMI, or using DVI instead if possible. Messing around with video drivers definitely does not seem the right way to go, IMO, the only thing to make sure there is that you are running the screen's native resolution.

Yeah telly/monitor hybrids are notoriously fussy and awkward to get set up properly with PCs, we've got the media centre PC connected up to an old 720p Samsung telly over HDMI and that took a bit of jiggery pokery to get right. The bedroom laptop is hooked up to a more modern 1080p (albeit cheapy make) telly via HDMI and that's never been quite right. I fucked about with it for long enough to get it 'OK' and left it at that, some random combination of the mode on the telly and something in the Intel graphics settings on the laptop.

In short, get a proper monitor if you want to do serious work.

Games seem to be running nicely. Shogun is pretty gorgeous almost maxed out with the latest shaders and what-not. However it did seem to stick around 75-80c with all the graphical gubbins. Saints Row 4 usually went up to 67c. I assume these are safe temperatures? At what point should I knit my brow with concern?

CPU or graphics card?

CPU - The thermal limit on modern Intel CPUs is 100C, and even when they hit that they don't actually blow up or anything, they just throttle one or more of their cores to keep them at or under 100C. Your G3258 CPU has a pretty epic overclock on it (running at 4.2GHz from a stock speed of 3.2GHz) so it's going to run hot. If it's capping out around 80C then that's absolutely fine.

Graphics card - The GTX960 on the stock profile favours heat over noise, i.e. It'll allow the GPU to get fairly toasty to keep fan noise to a minimum. What you'll generally find is it'll try to limit its peak to around 80C and then ramp up the fan at that point to maintain 79-80C. The thermal limit on this GPU is 98C, but you'll find the fan will adjust automatically to keep it well clear of that.

In other words, 80C on either CPU or GPU is nothing to worry about. 90C+ on a consistent basis I'd start to get a bit concerned about, but even then you'll find they'll throttle and/or increase fan speed to keep themselves safe rather than allowing themselves to come to any harm.

For a better idea fire up the Unigine benchmark at 1920x1080 with extreme tesselisation and 4xAA enabled, I'd imagine the GPU will quite quickly cap out at around 80C and you'll just notice a bit more fan noise when it hits that point. Mrs Hearthly's new PC (which is a low noise gaming PC in a small case) does exactly that, and it has a GTX960 in it.

https://unigine.com/products/heaven/download/

Graphics card. I haven't checked CPU temperatures yet. That's good to hear that they're designed to limit to 80c, that seems in line with what I found on the punishment I put it through with maxed out everything on Shogun 2. It may be a couple of years old but they updated it with spangling new shaders and tessellation stuff and what-not. Looking at the temps it bounced between 75-80, so that seems in line. My fears are calmed. Thank you.

Irritatingly my computer refuses to recognise a few of the .tiff film scans I imported, and even went to BSOD when I tried to fiddle with them. No biggy though, at worst I can just rescan the negatives. Baffling though as the other computer didn't have a problem.

Homeworld Remastered out today, woo!

I will probably get a proper monitor at some point soonish in the future. A second camera body and a wide lens are priorities next though. And a nice new coat.

Get http://www.memtest.org/ and run it for an hour or so to make sure you don't have any intermittent memory problems. It's not a bad idea to do that to new PCs as part of a shakedown test as a matter of routine.

You really shouldn't ever see a BSOD on a modern Windows machine, unless there's a hardware problem.

Cheers guys, will install and run that later. No other BSOD's so far, phew.

Bugger! Spoke too soon, just had another BSOD.

Dodgy RAM deffo number one suspect.

Run Memtest and it should flag up the faulty DIMM pretty quickly.

If you get time to, grab a pic of the blue screen as it'll have an error code attached to it which will point towards what Windows thinks is the culprit.

Check your Windows Event Log, that should have a copy of the STOP error code or suchlike in it from when the blue screen occurred. (This negates the previous step, come to think about it.)

There should also be a file in C:\Windows\minidump

I'd want to try and troubleshoot as much as possible by pulling a memory stick and suchlike to identify the faulty one, but Overclockers may not want you to so I'd get in touch with them first. They have a web-based RMA system.

Bit of a bugger I'm afraid Pete but it does sound like you have a hardware issue there

Followed by dodgy PSU as a fairly distant second, the symptoms of which can be so mysterious they are best summarised as "my PC is haunted."

Okay, pass 1 complete on memtest and no errors found. How many passes are advisable to be sure?

I'll check the minidump next.

Here's the specs of the computer:


System Specification

- Case: Choice of Gaming Case
- Power Supply: Super Flower 350W 80+ Gold Rated PSU
- CPU: Intel Pentium G3258 Anniversary Edition overclocked to 4.20GHz
- Motherboard: Intel H81 (Socket 1150) ATX Motherboard
- Cooler: Prolimatech CPU Cooler - RAM: Up to 16GB DDR3 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit
- Hard Drive: 2x2TB Hard drives (Requested a second 2TB HD added from the drop down menu, the original spec just lists 1TB HD.)
- Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 2048MB Graphics Card (options available)
- Sound: Realtek 7.1 Channel Sound (On-Board)
- Optical Drive: OcUK DVD+/-RW SATA Drive

Now I've added a second HD to that. I don't know how much power they draw but I was pondering if that tipped it over the edge as far as voltage required goes. Then again both errors occurred when the system had an idle load, so it probably isn't that.

Another possibility I heard somewhere vaguely is that it could be fixed with a BIOS drivers update. Now I installed Windows myself but I figured BIOS would already be up to date. Two discs came with the machine, one being Intel IIH81-16 drivers. Should I have installed that? Or will installing them help?

Ooh, 350W stikes me as being pretty low. If loading up a .tiff makes the graphics card work hard it might start trying to draw too much power.

Odd that it doesn't happen in games, though, so RAM is probably still the #1 culprit. I used to get a crash every time I jumped in the water in Crysis, because the GFX cards would pull too hard.

Yeah, on reflection I was pondering that, but surely it must be sufficient otherwise they wouldn't have default specced it so?

350W is apparently the minimum required for a GTX 960, so they might be pushing it a bit.

Power draw for that card seems to be around 120w max, so you should have plenty of headroom I would have thought.
Hard drives are bugger all, about 10w at full draw.

I guess it could be a HD error, then, with a bad sector or something? I'll run a check on that next. Half way through the second test pass and no problems flagged yet. :/

When I was getting BSOD's a year or so ago, it wasn't until the 2nd or 3rd test that Memtest actually detected a problem.

Edit - My sense of time is messed up. It was two years ago now.

I know it's a hassle, but one of the reasons why buying a ready made system is a good idea is that you don't have to worry about diagnosing this crap. Just give them a bell and tell them it's broken and they need to fix it.

Have you checked the 'System' bit of the Windows Event Log from the time it happened? There should be a STOP error code or something similar logged in there, Googling that can usually point off in the right direction.

If you go into the BIOS (or look on POST screen) that'll tell you what revision the BIOS is at, or CPU-Z will give you the same information from within Windows.

You can then check the motherboard manufacturer's website to see if there are any updates.

Well yes there is that as well, although it's most likely going to involve sending the whole thing back, which would be a bit of a ballache.

It depends what Pete's opinion on it is I suppose, and what his tolerance/desire for troubleshooting is!

As an aside, I was wondering about my graphics card t'other day. Is there any point in my upgrading it? It's a 6970 and I play stuff on a 1920*1080 monitor. I expect i'm missing a few of the latest DX bells and whistles, but how much would I need to spend to notice a serious difference in performance?

My tolerance is fairly high for an evening of testing. And returns turn around states that they endeavour to do so within 28 days, which is a wait I'd prefer not to do. Anyway, two passes complete without error, so I reckon I'll check that log file in windows now and run a memory test.

It's still a pretty capable card, TBH it depends what games you play and what pretties you want to be able to turn on, and what framerate you're comfortable with. At 1920x1080 the 6970 is in its comfort zone, it'd choke somewhat if you stepped up to 2560x1440.

For a serious upgrade you'd want to move to a GTX970 (AMD are a bit nowhere at the moment), although a GTX960 would represent a solid upgrade for not much cash and probably be a lot more pleasant in the power consumption and noise department too.

I only upgrade my graphics card when my current one stops doing what I want it to, so for example I binned off my GTX480 (which is roughly equivalent to a 6970) when I got a 27 inch monitor and the 480 couldn't handle BF3 without too much compromise on either detail settings or framerate at the new resolution of 2560x1440 (up from 1920x1080).

The plan is to move to PC gaming on the projector when I move house, which is 1920*1080. Might as well stick with what i've got I guess!

I had some bad RAM a couple of years ago that would annoyingly only fail memtest (bootable) intermittently, so give it a good few goes.

I put up with BSODs for a while, I really shouldn't have as it really spoiled my 'new pc' feeling. A brand new PC should be very stable.

I've only skim read the above so apologies if this is totally irrelevant, but could the overclocked cpu be causing the bsod? My computer started blue screening a couple of years ago but once I reverted the cpu back to stock it has worked fine since.

Next time you get a BSOD of death go here on your PC C:\Windows\Minidump

You should have a file with a .dmp extension. Get the one with the latest date and post it here

I can have a look at it in the debugging tools and maybe give you a clue as to what the issue is

Will also need to know what OS you are running and if its 32 or 64 bit

I think it told him he has 99 problems but a RAM issue ain't one.

ok cheers mate, I will bear that in mind.

I've been having reet trouble with my laptop today. The sodding trackpad locks up; doesn't work; judders; stops altogether and so on.

I've opened the tasks manager and the CPU is around the 80%-100%.

Wanna pic?

POW!



So what do we think is going on here techno nerds? It's still within warranty if that matters a dime. Shall I smash it over someone's head in PC World?

Sort by CPU usage and see what's at the top.

I'd only got open Outlook, Word and the bloody file manager. Chrome as well, sometimes.

Fucking thing.

Some fragmenter thing?

Looks that way - assuming the laptop's being unresponsive while that screenshot was taken.

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/disable-d ... tation-ssd

Boom! I'll turn that shit off then.

Fank coo Grim..!

Could be, could be. I might test that, after checking with them.

I had another BSOD just now in the middle of Homeworld, got the message down:

'STOP 0x00000124
Uncorrectable hardware error.'

Bah.