Be Excellent To Each Other

Summer getting you down? Noticed that all of your hardware seems to be running about 10c hotter than normal? Tired of shitty drivers that don't do enough to cool your GPUs and put loads of strain on them?

Fear not ! for I have found the best piece of software ever for taking control of your hardware and making sure it survives.

The proggy is called Afterburner and is made by MSI. It works on any graphics card known to man given that it uses the Rivatuner mechanics, but it's just awesome sauce.

Firstly you can overclock, underclock, overvolt and undervolt* and secondly you can take control of the fans and create a custom profile in about thirty seconds. My GPU temps were into the low 50s on idle due to the hot weather, so I simply upped the fan speeds to match temps and now they're way back in line. All you do is create a marker point, tell it at what temp to kick in the fans and it does the rest. You can even tell it when to search in miliseconds.

*voltage tweeks need your card to have a bios that allows them to be changed.

I'm fuckin' A sure if I had this app last year my 280 would still be here.

He might be right. It's Win7 x64 but I have no idea about card or current driver version. It's a work PC, so not something I really give a fuck about

At least give the CCC thing a go, if you're bored and the PC isn't totally locked down, so I can pass on a yay/nay to him. Also it's almost science.

This morning I decided to email Asrock's CS and ask if they ever planned to support the X6. I was expecting a flat "No, what the hell do you want for £30?" What I did get however was hilarious.

Firstly I got a response from the Netherlands. Usually I get a reply in Engrish (http://www.engrish.com if you needed it explained) but this time I got a response from the Netherlands division of Asrock. It read -

Dear Mr XXX. This model will never officially support 6-core CPU’s. With BIOS version XXXXX it should normally work, but please keep in mind that this special BIOS version has not been tested or released in the way we test our official BIOS releases. So you can try, but don’t cry

Please find attatched our in house ISO that you will need to flash the board. DO NOT extract the BIN and flash it in the usual manner.

ROFLMFAO. That's just top. A £30 motherboard that not only runs Crossfire but thanks to AWESOME customer service and a genuine passion for getting everything working a sneaky bios that will never be released.

I checked Asrock's website and sure enough, the XXXXX bios that I XXXXed out does not exist.

You're not going to try flashing your bios again are you?

*gets popcorn, settles*

I've flashed this board five times now. Thankfully AMD chipsets (unlike Nforce) allow the use of Winflash. So it's amazingly simple and with pretty much no risk. Winflash will flash your bios in Windows and then run a series of checks to make sure it's 100% before allowing you to reboot. Not only that, if it does find a problem it asks you to revert the bios before rebooting.

Funny how a £30 motherboard can do all of that and support Crossfire and support X6 cpus. Yet my £200 Crosshair 2 Nforce 780a can do about fuck all.

so you are going to try an untested bios...

Man I admire your bravery/stupidity*





*delete appropiate

Well it's obviously been tested. Just not by thousands of people

If the board dies whoopee do. I need to spend £30. Hardly worth crying over. And Scansure will cover me if it doesn't happen and I need to send the Thuban back.

I never cease to be amazed by how much you enjoy dicking with your PC.

In fact you spend more time dicking with it than actually using it so I suppose it doesn't matter if you break it. Just remember don't cry.

No commentabout sending a dead board back that your broke.. I think that has been covered before..

That's why I created a twin for it

I'm sure it'll be fine. I won't find out for another month or so any way because it's against my religion to pay more than £120 for a CPU. I'll get back at least half of that for the 940 tbh.

It was yes. The first one (DFI Lanparty) was caused by my memory card reader and the second and third were caused by Asus's logo software. Why they continued to ship it when it obviously doesn't work is beyond me.

Since then I remembered I paid for Scansure on the DFI any way (bastards caught me out, I didn't specifically want it) and that covers spilling water on it, breaking it when installing it and so on.

I didn't realise DFI make a machine that can flash dead boards and bring them back to life. Wasn't that expensive either IIRC.

*sniggers*



I've never seen a bios with an L at the front and a Z at the back before

Why have you blurred it out?

Because AMD have apparently issued instruction to Asrock and other companies not to release a bios that will allow the Thuban hex core to run on 480x chipsets.

They allowed Asrock and others to continue producing the chipsets to make budget boards. I mean fuck man, mine was £30 with full Crossfire support and god knows what else. I think AMD want to put a cap on certain aged boards tbh. Makes sense, I mean, how you gonna sell and pimp your lovely new 890GX chipset if every AM2+ board runs the hex?

So I'm sort of under an understanding..

Oh fuck that, what are they going to do?

Probably not much. But I'm done shooting myself in the foot on the internet. Words hang around and come back to haunt you.

Can anybody recommend a USB headset that doesn't make your ears hurt (not from the sound but from the ear padding aggravating them) after two hours?

but youhave told the internets what has been done

Get something full cover.

http://www.google.co.uk/products?hl=en& ... a=N&tab=wf

Are good. I know I know, the price stings a little... But you do get what you pay for.

Hmm, infact.. You're gonna fuckin hate me for this, but

http://accessories.euro.dell.com/sna/pr ... =624-10076

For £50 that's actually a lot of set for the cash. But just look up some full cover headsets. Razer do one too but man, it's not cheap. Infact yes, it's £125 lol.

Aha ! I fucking knew I had seen some of these somewhere.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Turtle-Beach-HPA2 ... ponents_RL

That's what I have. Not only are they a £150 set but they also come with a nice toolkit, beanie hat and lazer pointer. But all of the junk aside (though I confess the toolkit is ace) they're an amazing set. You'll give up long before they do, and the 5.1 makes them amazing for movies.

How can you get 5.1 sound through a pair of headphones? I thought you needed 6 speakers?

They have six speakers dude. Honestly they're a serious feat of engineering. The sub plays so hard you can hear your head vibrating. Almost like being in a car with a fuck off loud system in.

That's what I meant with my comment about giving up before they do

I once bought a set of headphones that had tiny little speakers in each earpiece or can, or whatever the fuck audiophiles call them, to give a surround sound effect.

This is because I'm a twat who'll buy any old shit. They were rubbish.

Mine aren't ! The effect is amazing. My sound card has a test which was the first thing I ran. It basically goes "doodle doodle DOON" over all of the channels. It really fucking freaked me out at first because I thought some one was standing behind me.

Mind you they're not cheap. But loud? fuck me I'm deaf as a post (twin 18" subs in my car with three amps and a 8f cap) and I can't go all the way. I remember one night I had a Zombie sesh on them and my ears were ringing for about an hour after.

My strategy was getting a tiny usb soundcard, that was allowing any headphones to be used. That way you avoid having to buy a wanky 'gaming' headset (and the price premium probably attached to it) and replacement is easier should they break.

I really need to have a mic not just the headphones so I can scream obscenities converse with my team mates in various online games.

I should also have specified that I was not going to pay a ridiculous amount of money for them. Found a nice Microsoft full ear set for £17 reduced from £35 with lots of good reviews.

m$ make lovely peripherals. Always have.

Not sure why by posting 'm$' winds me up..

it is MS or Microsoft ...

They can fake it by simulating the way a sound sounds when it comes from behind you.

Hang on...



Just use normal headphones.

That's not 5.1, although it is positional audio. There's also no such thing as .1 on headphones, or indeed any way to physically mount the centre driver, so the 5 is also a misnomer. The picture JC put up is more like 8.0 really.

Hence "fake". I'm going to invent 2.1 headphones that have a sub driver on the top or something. AWESOMES.

Fake implies it's worse though. It's not, it's often much better than 5.1 is.

I suspect any sub driver worthy of the name is probably a little heavy to be head mounted.

You need to think outside of the box. All you need is to fix some kind of tripod to these headphones, so you can place them on a desk, then simply lower your head into the headphones. Voila! All the weight is being taken by the desk. Hey, it's what Nintendo did with the Virtual Boy, and that was a massive success!

I will drill bass through your very skull!

Or a crash helmet!!

If I'm not mistaken (which I'm not) headsets with microphones predate computers with soundcards.

I got USB soundcard for £3, and a decent headset for £10 from a musical stockist. (Or the other way round, really)

Getting the more generic unit has been useful for both other applications, and also when I broke the first one in a soul calibur 4 ground humping lizard induced rage.

Given that all a usb headset is is the two fused together and more expensive for the privilege or something much less versatile, I can't see why getting anything other than separates makes sense.

It's just the abbreviation not me taking the piss (this time )

MS is usually associated with multiple sclerosis.

I just got an email from Asrock with the BIOS attached. Is yours the BIOS 3.71z support x6 CPU?

CD_BIOS_Upgrade_EN.txt
ALXFES_371z.iso

were the files that came with it.

It's the abbreviation if you happen to be a 14 year old linux fanboy. If you're not, then it's MS.

I think most people will know from context (as you do with other such things where there are identica, initialisms) that you're not talking about multiple sclerosis.

"Multiple sclerosis make lovely peripherals. Always have." makes no sense, particulary in a hardware thread on a pretty tech savvy forum.

Of course, I do remember my days of using Multiple Sclerosis-DOS.

Is it buggery the abbrivation I am sure Mircosoft don;t use M$.


abbreviations and accroyns should be taylored for the target audience, so in a PC hardware thread what do you think MS will mean

edit: MR Dave beat me and said it better

Well I didn't know that you could purchase headsets from musical stockists. I have never seen any but then I haven't ever really looked as I have never felt the need to plug a headset in to my sound system and your initial post mentioned headphones and not headsets. But it is useful to know and I may go down this route as I have not actually ordered the MS set yet.

Have a look at it, at least. It may be that you can't find as good a deal, but even in rip off places like PC world, you can find a standard wired headset for £15 - and £10 less than similar usb units - although not as good as a musicians set would be.

Ebay typically has sound cards for the price (I'm not vouching for that particular seller/item, mind, that's just the first result - but my £3 one has multiple inputs/outputs including optical and sounds better than the motherboard sound too).

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/LOGITECH-PREMIUM- ... pAccess_RL

Those are quite comfy.

Used headsets.... brrrrrr!!

HUGE bargain alert. However, please read what I have to say before you rush to order. Firstly this drive DOES NOT WORK with Jmicron SATA controllers. See - Nvidia 790i. It also does not support TRIM natively so needs a firmware update.

It is, however, piss cheap for a big SSD with fantastic performance. Ordered !!!

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprod ... =HD-006-PA

For perspective, that's 1/2 and 2/3 the performance of the OCZ Vertex II I bought this week, for half the price. Not a bad tradeoff if you're on a tight budget although I'll stick with the Vertex II I think.

Yeah it's a cracking deal tbh. It doesn't come without work though. The firmware absolutely must be updated on the drive. If you poke around the net you will find some bad reviews. Firstly down to it not liking Jmicron SATA controllers and secondly on the random performance. However, checking Patriot's site before I ordered I found the following.

Notes:
Firmware update #3.004

* Improved power cycling during read/write cycles
* MBR Disabled


Firmware update #3.000

* Improved random read performance
* Improved random write performance
* Upgraded channel management

3.0004 was released on the 29th of July 2010. So it's just been all sorted out tbh. The drive was released in Nov 09 apparently for about £250, so providing you're up for flashing the firmware (very easy on this particular drive) then it is a good deal

Eww well spotted

I totally missed that.