PC Discussion Thread - All PC related in here.

[echo1 0]

What do we learn of that?

Likewise, Ive heard too many horror stories about ATI cards and in particular their drivers to consider getting one myself. That's not to say that nVidia are 100% bug free, rather that youre more likely to get a reliable card if you go nVidia. I will be particularily interested to see what Intel's entry into the high end Graphics market will be like.

[Lepardi 0]

What do we learn of that?

Likewise, Ive heard too many horror stories about ATI cards and in particular their drivers to consider getting one myself. That's not to say that nVidia are 100% bug free, rather that youre more likely to get a reliable card if you go nVidia. I will be particularily interested to see what Intel's entry into the high end Graphics market will be like.

That's just bs. Both have their problems, but AMD has better drivers than nvidia these days. I have heard horror stories from nvidia cards, if someone has had a faulty card it doesn't mean every card is faulty. You aren't more likely to get a more reliable card from nvidia. Both has faulty cards.

I only have bad experiences from nvidia cards, especially the drivers, but every ati card has worked 100% flawlessly for me.

[echo1 0]

I never said that it was a black and white situation, I just commented that Ive heard MORE stories about dodgy ATI cards than nVidia cards. Also, you have to differenciate stories about cards that have just been released (most of the bad stories Ive heard about nVidia cards come from people who bought cards like the 9800GX2 or GTX280 the week it came out) from cards that dont work despite being out for about 6 months (like the Radeon 3650). At any rate, Ive been using nVidia exclusively for about 6-7 years, and Ive never had any issues.

[Mr_Tea 0]

What do we learn of that?

Likewise, Ive heard too many horror stories about ATI cards and in particular their drivers to consider getting one myself. That's not to say that nVidia are 100% bug free, rather that youre more likely to get a reliable card if you go nVidia. I will be particularily interested to see what Intel's entry into the high end Graphics market will be like.

That's just bs. Both have their problems, but AMD has better drivers than nvidia these days. I have heard horror stories from nvidia cards, if someone has had a faulty card it doesn't mean every card is faulty. You aren't more likely to get a more reliable card from nvidia. Both has faulty cards.

I only have bad experiences from nvidia cards, especially the drivers, but every ati card has worked 100% flawlessly for me.

How can it be a faulty card when the same function that is causing an reboot in one game, works with much higher settings in every other game?

If there where an problem with the AA of the Card, i had returned that thing the next day.

What you call bs, can be called experience. And that is what i´ve gathered over the years.

[Lepardi 0]

What do we learn of that?

Likewise, Ive heard too many horror stories about ATI cards and in particular their drivers to consider getting one myself. That's not to say that nVidia are 100% bug free, rather that youre more likely to get a reliable card if you go nVidia. I will be particularily interested to see what Intel's entry into the high end Graphics market will be like.

That's just bs. Both have their problems, but AMD has better drivers than nvidia these days. I have heard horror stories from nvidia cards, if someone has had a faulty card it doesn't mean every card is faulty. You aren't more likely to get a more reliable card from nvidia. Both has faulty cards.

I only have bad experiences from nvidia cards, especially the drivers, but every ati card has worked 100% flawlessly for me.

How can it be a faulty card when the same function that is causing an reboot in one game, works with much higher settings in every other game?

If there where an problem with the AA of the Card, i had returned that thing the next day.

What you call bs, can be called experience. And that is what i´ve gathered over the years.

Did you try boosting the fan speed if it gets too hot in your case maybe?

I never had any problems you described on my AGP radeons. But for sure that wouldn't be a problem any more if you upgrade a new mobo and a 4850 instead of 9000 series nvidia.

[Mr_Tea 0]

I would not say 49°C are too hot.

And other hardware demanding games worked for hours without that problem.

It is an bug in their drivers.

After i installed the latest AGP hotfix drivers with catalyst 8.7 included not one game could start. And it was the Hotfix for the 3000 series.

Edit:

Not only that not one game would start, for every game i started i got an instant reboot.

[Baff1 0]

I always found the amount of graphics RAM to be a very poor way of measuring how good the card is going to be, its perfectly feasible that a good 128MB card can outpace a low end 512MB card. In reality, most good cards these days have 512MB anyway, so its rather superflous to recommend it.

You will notice it on your high res textures.

In ARmA on my 256 6800Ultra, I use the high resoution textures for taking screenshots only.

On my 1GB cards I play the game that way.

Youre still completely ignoring my point. Graphics RAM is, in itself, a poor way of measuring how good the card is. High end cards just happen to have large amounts of RAM, but that in itself is not the reason why they are good. Its like saying that your Mercedes with electric windows is fast, and your 20 year old Fiat doesnt have electric windows and is slow, therefore all cars with electric windows are fast. A good example of that was the 8800GT which used to be made in both 256MB and 512MB versions. The difference was at best of times negligible. Of course, everyone got the 512MB model anyway because it was barely any more expensive, but that's kinda beside the point.

Quote[/b] ]A 128 MB card is gimped. If you intend to run your game at resolutions of 1024x768 only and with low textures you will be fine.

That's because the last decent cards that had 128MB of RAM were made many years ago. But what I was saying was that something like a Radeon 9800 Pro with 128MB is better than lets say, a GeForce 7300GS with 512MB of RAM.

Quote[/b] ]Finally, GPU generation will give you access to the latest special FX. High luminosity in DX9 or volumetric clouds in DX 10, or Physic's processing on the 260/280's for example.

So basically youre saying that new graphics cards are faster than old ones? Most of us guessed that by now.

No. I have not ignored your point. I have addressed it in detail.

I have been explaining what difference in performance you can expect to see if you buy larger RAM sizes and why I believe it to be good value for money.

A 9800 (ATI) with 128 RAM may will play Quake IV with higher FPS than a 7300 with 512 RAM, but only with low res textures. It may well be unbalke to play Quake IV at maximum texture size completely and crash to desktop instead.

At higher resolutions, 3840x1280 or 2048x1600 we can expect it to actually have slower FPS than the 7300 with the 512 RAM.

(Not only this but a 9800 ATI with 128 MB of very slow RAM will not be significantly faster than a 7300 with very fast RAM. The Speed of your GFX RAM is equally as important as the speed of your GPU).

And no, I am not attempting to say that newer generation cards are faster than older generation cards.

This is not necessarily the case. It is still primarily dependant on the GPU clock speed and the RAM clock speed.

The Nvidia 9800 GPU is the exact same speed as the 8800 GPU, for example, which in turn is not very different to the 7800 in terms of render speed.

And a 7600 is not a faster card than a 6800, it is a slower one.

For the most part rendering speed is a function of GPU clock speed and RAM clock speed. These are the numbers you should be looking for, not the generation of the card.

Card generation does not define it's render speed but instead defines the type of FX it is able to produce. Shader model, Volumetrics, physics processing...

An 8800 with fast RAM beats a 9800 with average speed RAM.

You have to look up the clock speeds of the memory and the clock sppeds of the RAM. In order to make your purchasing decison.

So.....if you owned a 7800 Ultra, but never intended to buy Windows Vista for the DX 10, then Upgrading to 8800 Ultra wouldn't turnout to be an upgrade at all, but would in fact provide you with identical performance to the equipment you already owned.

Similarly if you owned an 8800 Ultra, moving to the 9800 ultra you could again expect to see no improvement of any kind whatsoever and this a would be a very large waste of your money.

If however you moved from a 8800ultra with 512 RAM or a 9800 Ultra with 512 RAM to a 280 with 1GB RAM, you could expect to see higher FPS at extremely high resolutions (but the same at medium ones), due to the increased RAM size, and you could expect to take advantage of the next generation of PHysX coding to be found in up and coming game releases.

[echo1 0]

(The Speed of your GFX RAM is equally as important as the speed of your GPU).

This is only true when you are comparing cards of similar capability. In reality, I have never seen anything, either in my own experience or from anything Ive read on the net or in magazines that suggests that a lower end card can suddenly outspeed a higher end card at higher resolutions becase it has more RAM, or faster RAM. The design of GPU is the single most important unit in a graphics card, everything plays second fiddle. I stress the GPU itself, not GPU speed, because although, for example, the HD2900 had a faster GPU, and faster GDDDR4 RAM than the 8800GTX, it was slower overall.

Quote[/b] ]And a 7600 is not a faster card than a 6800, it is a slower one.

Well obviously a new midrange card isnt going to be much faster than an old €500 model, but I was referring to was comparing cards at a particular price point (in particular, the one they were targeted at when released)

Quote[/b] ]For the most part rendering speed is a function of GPU clock speed and RAM clock speed. These are the numbers you should be looking for, not the generation of the card.

If there was a single ounce of truth in that statement, we'd be all using super-overclocked GeForce 2 cards. No, when new generations are released they are more efficient designs, that support the latest graphics technologies (the ones that have to be implemented on a hardware level of course).

Quote[/b] ]So.....if you owned a 7800 Ultra, but never intended to buy Windows Vista for the DX 10, then Upgrading to 8800 Ultra wouldn't turnout to be an upgrade at all, but would in fact provide you with identical performance to the equipment you already owned.

You are joking right? Did you ever wonder why the 8800GTX got rave reviews despite being released a year before the first DirectX 10 games came out? (and about 6 months before Vista was released). Its because it was a very very efficient design that just happened to support DirectX 10 games. Don't believe me? Read any review of them.

[Baff1 0]

Up until now you had never read about the importance or relation of RAM size at high resolution.

Now you have.

RAM is critical to high resolution rendering, if you are out of GFX RAM you are then caching to system RAM, or even HDD (probable application crash). There isn't any point having a mighty fast GPU if your calculations are still being routed through the CPU. It defeats the object.

You may well be correct on the difference in GPU between ATI and Nvidia, since I only buy Nvidia, that's not something I have any experience of.

Geforce 4, is a super clocked Geforce 2. We did all buy them.

We are very often using superclocked cards.

In fact premium cards of any generation, the fastest ones, are the ones with overclocked GPU's and overclocked RAM.

These are the ones that cost an extra 50 quid.

A 7900 is an overclocked 7800.

7800 got rave reviews too.

and the 6800.

so did the 4800.

I own them all. In fact I own more than one of them all.

Even the 5800 had pretty great ones.

That's not to say that there haven't been marked improvements and refinements to the designs over the years, there obviously have.

The biggest of these has been the RAM speed. All the way up to DDR5 now.

Many of the improvements and refinements you speak of, have not been to the chips themselves but rather to the cooling systems.

Allowing for increased overclocking.

GPU clock speed and triangles per second hasn't really shifted much for a few years now.

Instead of getting more powerful GPU's we have instead all been buying second and third GPU's.

SLI's and GX2's etc.

[echo1 0]

Up until now you had never read about the importance or relation of RAM size at high resolution.

Now you have.

Thanks, I already have. But as I keep saying, it only holds true for cards of relatively similar capability. What I had a problem with is that going onto a forum and saying "Hey folks, get a 512MB graphics card! Theyre great!" paints only half the picture. There are so many other things to consider when buying a graphics card, in reality, RAM amount is probably the last thing to consider. Ive seen too many people say "I got a xxxMB graphics card, and it runs really slow". It's great that you know so much and own so many graphics cards, but this is a place for advising people, and giving misleading information is something that I take objection to.

Quote[/b] ]RAM is critical to high resolution rendering, if you are out of GFX RAM you are then caching to system RAM, or even HDD (probable application crash). There isn't any point having a mighty fast GPU if your calculations are still being routed through the CPU. It defeats the object.

It so happens that high end cards happen to have sufficiently large amounts of RAM anyway so that sort of thing doesnt happen. Just dont expect a 8400GS with a gig of RAM to outdo a 256MB 8800GT, or even come close to performance, because unless a GPU is actually capable of handling high resolution textures or models, youre going to have a problem long before you get to the RAM.

Quote[/b] ]A 7900 is an overclocked 7800.

I know that, but every second generation or so they really shake things up. Sure the 7800GTX was well received, but did you ever read a review of an 8800GTX? It was so disproportionately advanced over the last generation of graphics cards that people were talking about it like it was the second coming of Christ, the same is happening to a certain extent with ATI's 4870. Believe me, GPU design is very important to performance.

[Baff1 0]

Up until now you had never read about the importance or relation of RAM size at high resolution.

Now you have.

Thanks, I already have. But as I keep saying, it only holds true for cards of relatively similar capability. What I had a problem with is that going onto a forum and saying "Hey folks, get a 512MB graphics card! Theyre great!" paints only half the picture. There are so many other things to consider when buying a graphics card, in reality, RAM amount is probably the last thing to consider. Ive seen too many people say "I got a xxxMB graphics card, and it runs really slow". It's great that you know so much and own so many graphics cards, but this is a place for advising people, and giving misleading information is something that I take objection to.

Since that isn't the only thing I said and since I went on to clarify in detail the exact circumstances you could expect to see the difference and the amount it would cost you, and carried on to relate all my other suggested criterions for buying GFX cards and their priorites, the only reason you are taking objections is because you are objectionable by nature.

The 8800GTX is a great card.

Now line it up in a row with a 7800 a 6800 and 9600 and 280 and run the same game on the same settings.

Then do it again for every game you own.

Then you will be sitting in the same chair as me.

I'm not here to regurgitate reviews I've read with you.

Neither am I attempting to mislead anyone. I am being as clear and concise as I am able to, on a subject on which I feel I have directly related first hand experience, up to and including a professional level.

[echo1 0]

Now line it up in a row with a 7800 a 6800 and 9600 and 280 and run the same game on the same settings.

Then do it again for every game you own.

Then you will be sitting in the same chair as me.

I have no doubts I would be. I personally, just believe in recommending particular graphics cards, not individual specifications. Individual specifications are misleading, because they're at the mercy of the design as a whole.You can have all the fancy looking specifications on paper in the world, but its the real world performance that counts. That's all I shall say of it.

Quote[/b] ]the only reason you are taking objections is because you are objectionable by nature.

Yeah, Im very much the resident cynic around these parts Sorry for any offence caused  

[SWAT_BigBear 0]

It's been a few days..

is Placebo enjoying his new ATI.....or pulling his hair out (if any)?

[Lepardi 0]

It's been a few days..

is Placebo enjoying his new ATI.....or pulling his hair out (if any)?

Well I'm enjoying my new HD 4870, so much better than 8800 GTS which I had. ArmA now runs smooth as silk on the highest settings. Not to mention how much better image quality it has, there's a clear difference between 8800 GTS and HD 4870.

[Deadfast 43]

I just put the new HD4870 to my new rig.

Runs like cream. At least in ArmA.

Unfortunately in Kane and Lynch I'm getting BSOD caused by atikmag.sys (Vista Business 64).

I looked up it on the net and the problem dates back to 2Q of 2007!

Any ideas? Are there any specific drivers that work?

[Placebo 29]

I think we're all getting a little off base in terms of ATI cards v NVIDIA cards, best to stick as much as possible to provable data, or at least anecdotal evidence from recent times, like many people I had a bad impression of ATI drivers dating back a number of years but that's no reason to assume it's still the same now that AMD are in charge

It's been a few days..

is Placebo enjoying his new ATI.....or pulling his hair out (if any)?

Unfortunately I haven't received it back yet, hoping this week

[Shadow NX 1]

Right and because of that i post my superb prob now

---

Ok, this one is very weird, yesterday night i worked on something in Oxygen and when i started the viewer my LCD went dark and told me "Activating Standby".

Nothing helped to get out of this so called standby.

I restarted.

PC starts, LCD also starts for a second to give me the Standby message again and then get dark again.

Tried it a few times, each time same result.

Once i switched the PC of with the main switch.

After start the LCD worked till the part where i get asked if i wanna start windows normally or in safe mode.

I picked safe mode and after that i got the lovely standby message once more... dark.

Frustrating.

The LCD works on other PCs.

Could it be that my Gfx card is partly dead?

Have my doubts as it didnt show any weird effects in any game even under harsh conditions like a pretty hot room.

What else could cause such weird behaviour?

---

Hardware:

Win XP Pro SP2 with all updates

Nvidia 7800GTX

HP W2207h LCD

Hardware isnt overclocked at all

No drivers were changed before this happend, system ran wonderfull stable since weeks.

---

[Deadfast 43]

OK, disregard what I wrote. I didn't read your post properly.

Do you have a live-CD of any Linux distro at your disposal by any chance?

[Shadow NX 1]

OK, disregard what I wrote. I didn't read your post properly.

Do you have a live-CD of any Linux distro at your disposal by any chance?

Is this aimed at me?

No, no Linux only Windows CD but as the screen normally wont even start i cant do much anyway.

[Deadfast 43]

Yes, it was.

So you say the screen dies before the Windows loading screen?

If yes, try to connect the monitor to the other VGA connector (if available).

If it won't work, try the VGA in a different PC. If it fails to work there you can qualify the card as broken .

[Shadow NX 1]

Yes card has a monitor 1 and 2 out, i can try the second when im home.

The LCD itself worked fine on two other PCs.

So far its always the same, i switch on the pc, LCD led turns from stanby orange to green and before i even see anything i get this damn "activating standby" message again.

Its like it gets a impulse at start so it switches on just to notice that it gets no signal so it switches off again.

[echo1 0]

That could be PSU failure. Any possibility of getting a loan of another PSU or even another graphics card to narrow down the problems?

[Shadow NX 1]

PSU?

I guess you mean the power unit?

Doubt it as the pc itself seems to start and load windows correctly, problem is just that i cant see it, hehe.

Trying atm to get a friends PC so we can exchange parts and see what it could be.

Very weird problem and hard to find the source it seems.

[CameronMcDonald 146]

@Shadow_NX - got the same problem at one stage, was very odd, and I was about to kill myself thinking about buying a new GFX card before time.

Funny thing was, the problem resolved itself after a 12 hour rest. I'm not sure whether it had something to do with the GFX BIOS or something like that, but since the problem ocurred just after installing a new driver.

The card (8800GTX) was essentially "turning on" (e.g. fan turning, light on), but my monitor wouldn't pick it up at all. Sorry if this has been suggested previously, but have you tried reseating it or taking it out, then reinstalling it?

[Shadow NX 1]

Everythign in the PC seems to work, like you said, lights went on, fans worked, no alarm beeps.

I will take the gfx card out for a while and then put it back in, maybe that solves anything.

Wouldnt be too bad if it was the card because atm it seems to be  agood time to finally upgrade.

---EDIT---

Managed to start the PC and get a picture, however it only worked for maybe 20 misn then i got a very fuzzy picture and then strongly pixelated screen and so on, after some more time it switched the LCD off again.

Now it works again but once more i get these strange effects, possibly really the GPU?

Or what else could cause it?