Be Excellent To Each Other

Crysis chugs no matter what Pete. It even chugged on my 280 at a supposed 48fps min. It's just early DX10 code letting it down. Warhead had less enemies and less going on so was far nippier (if that's a word). If you have reached the cavern part with the fancy lights and swinging shadows you will know the achilles heel. I think it was utterly jaw dropping but poorly optimised..

Damn straight they are! I love my moleskin, and it gets attention from the ladies as well. They last a surprisingly long time as well, I was a bit cagey about laying out the money for one (£10 for a notepad?!) but this one's lasted for an age and feels lovely to write on, the texture of paper on hand is most nice, and the feeling of quiet satisfaction as you flip one open - oooh. All it lacks is some sort of quiet chiming noise when opened.

Just looked at the OCuk site and my computer now costs £110 more than it did when I bought it a few months ago, with the same system specs! So I win there. Just remembered that my card is a 4870, not a 4850 - I think. I'm not sure. How do I check, it just says '4800 series' when I look.

Oh, and just had a look at the temp setting, 27c for this card! I don't think mine has ever risen above 39c to be honest.

JC buy a Moleskin pad. They are perfection. It may fill an upgrading hole you never knew needed to be scratched.

Moleskin!?! You monster! Moles are *tiny*! They must have to kill hundreds to make a notepad. Get paper next time, you fiend!

Well the second 5770 is a bonus in honesty Pete. I wasn't expecting the RMA turn around to be so fast but then they don't have the 280GTX XT any more and haven't since I got mine. And I certainly wouldn't want an inferior one because it would be, well, you know, inferior. I phoned them earlier and they were dead nice about it. No fucking around just basically said the card was tested and found to be indeed faulty.. They said they could not replace it (very honest they could have strung me along for 90 days fucking around with XFX) so I mentioned credit and he said that was fine.

Now obviously it's kind of tricky because all they sell is graphics cards (well they have a motherboard but its LGA 775 on the 790i) so that leaves me with sitting on a credit note for ages (and I am sure that in the end it would become null and void) or grabbing something with that credit. Another 5770 makes perfect sense as two together will use less power than my 280 did and kick it's ass in all kinds of ways. It sucks that I need another motherboard but in honesty the way I go through shit it wouldn't be a bad idea to pick up a spare.

I reckon you could do it with three.

/wanders off to experiment.

Moleskin? sounds like one of them fancy condoms.

Oh wait that was lambs skin.

You've obviously never been on the receiving end of belligerent apple fans demanding you port your programs to macs (Response: Sod off, apple fans. I'm not spending money because you chose a shitty computer). And more cost is largely nonsense? You get windows for free on the mac, then?

"Moleskin" is the heavy cotton. "Moleskine" are the notebooks.

I see. I think I'm going to call you Zanussi from now on. The appliance of science

Are you home now? It's just that I have another one of those gay Alienware bios exe things and I want the bios out so I can pinch the new logo.

Sorry, that sounds rude. What I meant to say was please could you use your l33t h4x0r sk1llorz to remove the bios rom like you did before

Yes, I am home now, but I can't remember what I did last time to get the BIOS out. Didn't I document it in the post?

Nah you were dead cool and secretive.. I think it involved Linux though?

It was a Perl script I used; details here: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4822&p=312566#p312566

You can probably do that in a few seconds using a Linux boot CD.

Is it just me who can picture this ending in tears?

Noooo I don't want it for putting in a bios

I want it to use for my desktop backgrounds

Oh good. I think.

Aren't logos in bioses usually crappy low-res and 256 colours (at best) though?

Yeah but some of them are actually ok to be converted to 32 bit colour. Thisun for example came from Lacesensor's bios

Wow, is that Windows 7? Looks like a Chinese OSX rip-off.

Yes, and yes.

Wait a minute... people 'pay' for Windows? To be fair, I wasn't really addressing your 'more cost' point, because we're talking about an Apple computer where more cost is a given. This may be why I use a Windows machine these days, but I wouldn't begrudge someone buying a Mac if they have the budget for it. They're really incredibly lovely computers and are in many respects totally worth the premium price tag.

Notepads get attention from the ladies? I want this to be true, but where are you: the coffee shop next to the Daily Planet?

Empire State building Art Deco meets PC.



http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product

I just got a brand spanking new boxed Razer Lycosa Keyboard for £8 in a charity shop.

A happy day indeed. I am typing this on it and it feels lovely! Why anyone would dispatch this loveliness to a charity shop is beyond me.

The $80 one. Nice work sir.

Thanks

Yeah, the mirrored finish version. Very smart,I nearly bought one a few months ago but decided I couldn't justify spending that much on a keyboard.

WTG Nem

I've found some nice shit in charidee shops. I went in one once and saw the box for a pair of Creative Gigaworks speakers (twin yellow woofers). I saw the price on the box (£5) and started shaking in excitement. Opened it up to look and it was a fair pair of Altec Lansings that thumped hard. Very respectable for a bloody fiver

So yes, PC hardware. So I am about to get another 5770 1gb. This means I will have the cards and the straps to Crossfire. I can't afford a top end motherboard but I did find one made by Asrock with a bios 4 days old that supports my CPU and the entire 5 series range. It was only £40 delivered and has a couple of downsides, namely -

It's the first ever CrossfireX chipset so only one card will run at 16x in single operation mode. So basically if a game does not support Xfire I need to disable it in the control panel to get the full tilt from a single card (no biggy, this is why on Crossfire if it's not fully supported you actually get worse performance than you would on a single card). Basically when you run it in Crossfire mode (dual) the PCIE lanes split to dual 8X.

The other downside is it uses a sodding 20 pin power plug due to it being made in early 2007 (right as they began switching) and my 24 pin ATX plug won't physically fit and doesn't detatch so I have had to buy a £2 adapter cable.

Other than that I should have no problems at all

Oh there is one more downside. I have to buy more frigging thermal paste and it's so fucking expensive. I should use fucking toothpaste.


(yes, that was a joke).

Don't be so sure - my old motherboard had a 20 pin connector, and my new one-piece 24 pin PSU fitted into it fine. So long as it's a standard port on the motherboard, and there's nothing physically next to the port to block the 4 redundant pins, it seems to be fine. I ran it for ages like that.

Yeah that's the thing. It's got shite on both sides. I hate motherboards that are configured like this. The adapter was cheap though.. Just got to get some thermal paste now

I had the same problem, JC. My power supply fizzed a few years back, so I dragged myself into town on the Sunday buses to buy a new one, only to find the connector wouldn't fit (I was completely ignorant of there being 2+ types then). So I dragged myself back there the following day to see if I could find one, but didn't have any luck, so ordered one off the Internet instead. A few days' wait, in a house with practically nothing other than my computer for entertainment, and I was tearing my hair out.

On the plus side, I had some of the earliest, most restful nights of my life then.

Same here. Without the PC I have no in home entertainment at all and it's not long before I'm climbing walls. Thankfully in spring & summer I go fishing a lot so I can take or leave the PC then (well, almost )

I will only have about a day's downtime at most. All I have to do in theory is swap out a motherboard. Sadly this new one has 2 SATA ports missing (so 2 drives need to come out.. doable but annoying) a stupid molex connector right in the middle and won't allow me to use my Silverstone panel as I once did.

The Silverstone panel hijacks the 24 pin cable from the PSU and piggy backs the power button into it's sensor so you can turn the PC on and off with the remote. Thing is -

1. My WinMCE remote shuts the PC down
2. I never ever turned the PC on using the silverstone remote

So I definitely won't miss that function

*boring techy geek mode alert*

So I've been doing a lot of reading over the past few days all about SLI and Crossfire. It's actually dead interesting really.

As I mentioned the 480x chipset divides the PCIE 'lane' speed when you use two cards. So you have a set of two PCIE 1.1 slots. If you're only using one card you put a terminator (any one who used RIMMS will remember the terminology) or as Asrock call it a PCIE switch into the first port and then a GPU in the second. Then you get 16x PCIE. If you use a second card in Crossfire the bandwidth over the lanes halves and you get 8x a port.

Thankfully before I placed my order for the board (because I'd researched all of this beforehand) I found a great article on Tom's where they ran some benchmarks on dual 8x Xfire vs dual 16x Xfire. The results were actually very interesting. You don't gain that much at all really using 16x. Well, you do but in most cases (especially the newer title they tested) there was hardly any difference. Why does that sound like DDR3?

Individual Crossfire Performance - World in Conflict

PCIe x8x8 vs x16x16 fps Percent

HD2900 XT (512 MB) CF PCIe 1.0a x8x8 80.0 100.0
HD2900 XT (512 MB) CF PCIe 2.0 x16x16 83.0 103.8
HD3870 (512 MB) OC CF PCIe 1.0a x8x8 90.0 100.0
HD3870 (512 MB) OC CF PCIe 2.0 x16x16 90.0 100.0
HD3850 (256 MB) OC CF PCIe 1.0a x8x8 72.0 100.0
HD3850 (256 MB) OC CF PCIe 2.0 x16x16 78.0 108.3

Very interesting if you're a total geek like me

You're a few pages late with that.

The motherboard I've got has to divide PCI-E up into two 8x lanes if you're using two graphics cards, it's a limitation of the P55 chipset. So I read that same article before making my purchase. I gather the only real problem is it limits you to dual Crossfire or SLI as shoving in a third card will actually decrease performace so much that you'd be better with just the one card in there.

To be honest, I'm playing Mass Effect 2 at the moment (when I get time - I started on Sunday and still haven't left Omega Station) and it runs silky smooth at 1080p, with everything set to their highest values and 4xAA. No idea what the frame rate is, but I'd imagine it was around 60FPS merely going on how smooth it runs.

Street Fighter IV I know for a fact runs at a very steady 60FPS with everything on maximum at 1080p (4xAA) and Dirt 2 at about 70FPS with everything at maximum. And this is running my processor at 3.2GHz, when I have it on good authority that my board and CPU combination can easily hit 4.2GHz with the proper cooling applied. So I'm pretty damn chuffed all in all.

Which means finally, at long chuffing last, I can stop pissing about with the hardware and start actually playing the games on it. Wonderful! In fact, I'm increasingly feeling like I may keep this PC after all and cancel the Alienware order, especially as Dell are properly trying my patience now.

Indeed. Thankfully I shall never get that temptation as the Xfire board I am getting (today by the looks of it too) only has two PCIE slots

SLI is far more dependant on full x16 lanes. It's also actually quite shocking just how many motherboards on the market that share the lanes out. Crazy really. The entire X3x series all do it !

I'm totally thrilled at what I paid for the board. I'm not too happy it's an Assrock but to be fair to them it has bios updates a few days old and even though they canned it a long time ago they're still fully supporting it and answering all tech questions about it via email so fair play for that.

It's only real bad downside and one I only discovered last night (and am utterly fucked off about) is that it only has 4 SATA ports. Which sucks bells because I'm now going to have to remove two hard drives Having said that with crossfire running something has to give (PSU wise) and I have plenty of space to be able to remove them. Oh well



Never played the first one.. *embarassed*. I must read about that game.



SFIV ran well for me when I played it briefly. I'll no doubt be reinstalling it very soon. As for Dellienware? I told you. I ordered a keyboard.. A fucking keyboard from them and had to go through that awful phasing system. It took nearly a month to arrive, I got a phonecall at 6:30 am from a robot telling me it was being delivered and then never got the invoice.

Shoddy experience in truth mate.

The 4 redundant pins are clip off and on-able to the other 20 on my PSU. A smart move, it seems.

Mine too. It's a Coolermaster model and was supplied with the case.

It's Black.

YEEEEEEEEEEEHAWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

Bloody hell. I don't think I quite realised how incredible two of these 5770s was going to be.

I just read a review (25 page) and it would seem that two £120 cards strapped together can quite easily outperform not only a 5870 but in most cases the 295GTX aswell.

Basically they're cheaper than one 5850 and outperform it almost (if not) always, and nearly half of a 5870 and outperform it at least 50% of the time. Scaling is so good that you can expect 1.7x the performance over one card.

I really was not expecting that.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd ... ew-test/13

Didn't you just get a new graphics card the other day? Now you have 2 more?

I brought one last week and got the second one today in exchange for the dead 280. Picked up a motherboard to do Xfire for £33 and just waiting on the thermal grease and cable extenders now

Well last night I discovered that a £33 full ATX motherboard does come with drawbacks.

Namely -

It only has two fan headers. I needed five. Thankfully my fans also have Molex connectors on them so with some good cable work it should work out OK.

The board layout is pretty disastrous and if I want good airflow and it to look tidy I'm going to have to lay out a fiver on cable extensions and sundries.

I think it's going to be a bit of a sod to fit and requires a lot of thought. Switching from the EVGA to the Asus was pretty easy really as they both have a similar feature set and layout. But this Asrock is a bit of a pain.

You love it, you masochist!

You can buy tubs of thermal grease on eBay for not much money, which saves waiting around.

Yeah, you're right of course. I think if it was easy to do I'd have gotten bored. As it is it's been a nightmare and I haven't even touched the bloody thing yet. I've had to shuffle all of the data around on my hard drives and partitions to get what I need left in the PC onto the drive that will remain (as two need to come out, fucking 4 ports?).

I also need to completely rewire the cables surrounding the board. And because the SATA connectors are the older "constantly fucking falling out type" I need to get locking cables. At least that gives me an excuse to get funky coloured ones. Then I want funky coloured molex extensions and of course cable ties and tidys.

I can see this getting expensive....

Grim. I ordered some TG a couple of days back and got an email last night to tell me it was shipping today. Bit strange, I mean usually you ship it and then tell the person. Mind you for 99p delivered I wasn't expecting them to hand deliver it

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/MW007-Alienware-A ... 5190009ab5

Wow, that's pretty sick.

Even more sick that on Alienware UK it adds up to £3100

From a related link


Wow! A 5.6GHz CPU?

Don't.. That has to be THE most annoying, faggy fucking thing in the world.

A few months back a guy on Ebay was desperately trying to sell a fake Alienware. He kept listing it as an Alienware @ 9ghz. All it was was a shite pentium D overclocked in a tacky case that he had added all the cores together on.

Four times his auction got closed before he gave up.

Does any one have an old PCIE card I can borrow? I need it for about a minute. I will pay both way's postage.

*holds head in hands* What have you done this time, JC?

Nothing. That's the thing, I can't do anything until I get a card

The motherboard has been sent with bios 3.30 which is 2 bioses ago. I need it on 3.70 to support the Radeons.

I can't risk spending an entire day building the new set up and using up precious thermal paste if it's not going to work. I would have to switch the entire bugger back

So basically I need a jizzpile old GPU to put in merely for the bios flash.

I mean there's every chance the 5770s display a picture but I can't take that chance. I didn't buy a lot of thermal paste, literally enough to do the job twice if I had to but I would need to fit the new shit, take it out, fit the old shit and then refit the new shit again later on.

Way too risky. I really don't want to have to spend £25 (cheapest) on a graphics card just to use for a bios flash

As for the bios? I'm not worried at all in any way. This board has a pop out bios chip and Asrock provide any bios ver of your choice on a chip for $15. I have a mate in the states who does me good rates