Some kid wants to buy my newgrounds computer. I offered $1600 and he agreed. If this is for real, I'd be getting an AMD 720/DX11 Crossfire computer with the money. I can use my stepdad's 4770 to hold me over, and I'd be pocketing $600 for 5870s. Thoughts?

At 7/7/09 06:53 PM, PakaPaka wrote: Q6600 OC - 3GHZ, liquid cooling,

For a while now I have been attempting to get my Q6600 Revision G0 to 3.6GHZ or so but I have been unsuccessful. I got it to 3.5GHZ but I got a BSOD in about 5 minutes. Any tips?

That water cooling is going to waste with your cpu only at 3ghz. I would suggest reading this article about GTLRef. It's pretty heavy, but if you give it a good readthrough, it'll help you reach the FSB speeds you need.

At 7/7/09 08:20 PM, PolishMatt wrote:

At 7/7/09 07:35 PM, Tehpivot wrote: I know, but it will still run games, especially if I have one of these:

Yet again, we are dealing with an old system here so that's probably the most you can suck out of it anyways.

There's something fascinating about old tech. Even 5 years from now, not one person could look back at a GTX 280 and say it isn't still impressive. My uncle had an old pentium III in his basement that he said was top of the line for it's time. He almost gave it to me to take a look at and keep, but he change his mind.

My uncle DID give me two old All-in-one Apple desktops though. The next time I have nothing better to do, I'll be taking them apart to see if there's anything that isn't proprietary.

At 7/7/09 08:39 PM, Ecliptic wrote: ddr2 800

K.

Intel Pentium E5200

Great budget intel CPU, I've heard people hit 4ghz with that thing.

A: ASROCK is a good brand..

ASROCK is a shitty subsidiary of ASUS, so in otherwords, no. Recommendable brands are Gigabyte and ASUS.

B: this motherbaord would work..

No gripes there.

c: do you have any suggestions, but keep the cost low please!

Right now the 9600gt is a very reasonably priced gaming card, and it'll run Crysis on medium.

and yeah...

AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!

At 7/7/09 09:27 PM, ThoseSneakyFrench wrote: That water cooling is going to waste with your cpu only at 3ghz. I would suggest reading this article about GTLRef. It's pretty heavy, but if you give it a good readthrough, it'll help you reach the FSB speeds you need.

I figured it was going to waste. Nice article... finally my 2 years of learning electrical engineering can go to use haha. Thanks for the help, I'll see what I can do tomorrow.

Sorry to double post, but what would you say are reasonable temperatures for the FSB/Ram?
While my CPU and GPU don't go above 40C (that's where the Liquid Cooling goes through), my FSB is usually at 55-60C and my Ram goes as high as 68C when gaming for a while.

If I OC to 3.6ghz the FSB will be even hotter. Will it cause any problems? I'm going to guess and say no.

thanks ThoseSneakyFrench!!
im going with:MSI P43 Neo3-F LGA 775 Intel P43 ATX Intel Motherboard... $85

i was going to use this... XFX HD-485X-YDFC Radeon HD 4850 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFire Supported Video Card... $109

thanks for the 9600gt recommendation...
im going to use this...
XFX PVT96GYGF3$85!!! + COD:WaW lololol

and yeah... in total, it brings my cost down to... $391(not to mention the shipping...)
sweet! before the vid card swap, it was.. $436

At 7/7/09 08:39 PM, Ecliptic wrote: c: do you have any suggestions, but keep the cost low please!

I will save you the trouble and just give you a build. This is probably the best you can get for fewer than 500 and not including a monitor.

CPU: -
Intel Pentium E6300 Wolfdale 2.8GHz 2MB L2 Cache LGA 775 - 87.99

GPU: (In case you're an ATI fan)
ZOTAC ZT-96TES3D-FSP GeForce 9600 GT 512MB - 89.99
or
SAPPHIRE 100265HDMI Radeon HD 4830 512MB - 99.99

MOBO:
GIGABYTE GA-EG41M-US2H LGA 775 Intel - 74.99

RAM:
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 - 46.99

HDD:
Western Digital Caviar SE WD3200AAJS 320GB 7200 RPM - 49.99

PSU:
Rosewill RP500-2 500W - 49.99

DRIVE:
PLEXTOR 22X DVD Burner - 44.99

CASE:
COOLER MASTER Centurion 5 CAC-T05-UW Black - 44.99

Total: 489.92$

At 7/7/09 09:27 PM, ThoseSneakyFrench wrote: Thoughts?

i7.

Cereal.

Im getting a "constructed" PC in a week and i need to know if it can play new games easily (specifically games like cod5)

Specifications:
Intel desktop motherboard DG43TF
Intel core 2 quad 2.33 GHz Q8200
4gb DDR 667GHz Kingston Memory modules
500GB Seagate Barracuda 7,200 rpm SATA hard disk drive
XFX HD Graphics Card 512DDR3
Sony dual layer DVD-RW SATA Drive
MS Microsoft 3000 Wireless Keyboard/Mouse USB
22" TFT Display with analogue and DVI Input
Logitech Speakers LS11
Vista Home Premium

At 7/8/09 10:31 AM, Deathrow-cy wrote: Im getting a "constructed" PC in a week and i need to know if it can play new games easily (specifically games like cod5)

Specifications:

XFX HD Graphics Card 512DDR3

Please specify your graphics card model, you only gave brand and how much VRAM it has.

Please specify your graphics card model, you only gave brand and how much VRAM it has.

I basically wrote what it said on the paper they gave me, It doesnt say :\ .

At 7/8/09 10:31 AM, Deathrow-cy wrote: XFX HD Graphics Card 512DDR3

Be more specific. Nvidia cards use GDDR3 from the 9600gt all the way up to the GTX280.

At 7/8/09 10:56 AM, Deathrow-cy wrote: I basically wrote what it said on the paper they gave me, It doesnt say :\ .

Ask them to find out what the model of the video card is. They can easily rip you off that way.

At 7/8/09 10:31 AM, Deathrow-cy wrote: XFX HD Graphics Card 512DDR3

I hate it how companies obnoxiously plaster "OMDF IT'S HD" over anything with a display or that has the slightest bit of tech in it for the last decade. I hate those two letters in combination now. Semi-wild guess, they probably gave you a moderately fast mid-range card.

At 7/8/09 02:26 PM, Grubby wrote: I have a feeling the 8800 GT is going to last until 2015 for most max settings.

crysis 2.

i am using maximumpc's bang for the buck article as a guide not to mention my bro who is a big help!

he says i should stick with my previous video card.
thoughts?

heres a pic of my stuff im getting
photobucket...
yeahh...

At 7/8/09 10:29 PM, Ecliptic wrote: yeahh...

You are aware that the HDD you picked is 5400RPM, right? That's a very slow speed that is typically seen in only 2.5" (This is a 3.5") drives for laptops. Get yourself a 320GB WesternDigital 7.2K RPM drive for the same price. You lose a few GBs but you seriously need more space, just bite the bullet and shell a hundred for a 1TB WD 7.2K HDD. Also, Samsung isn't the greatest manufacturer when it comes to HDDs (They''re a good company for monitors though).

I'm buying a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black hard drive tomorrow along with Sennheiser 201 headphones.

also http://www.hwbot.org/result.do?resultId=
872835

Would any agree that under-clocking your GPU and CPU in your computers for those random nights when you want to download a bunch of torrents; is a good idea? I want to preserve the life in my hardware, save noise on less cooling being necessary when they run slower and save mother nature by using less electricity? I tried out some games after de-clocking (New term?) the GPU and I wasn't seeing any misaligned shadows, artifacts or vertical lines so my hypothesis is that it won't affect it negatively.

At 7/9/09 06:30 AM, PolishMatt wrote: Would any agree that under-clocking your GPU and CPU in your computers for those random nights when you want to download a bunch of torrents; is a good idea? I want to preserve the life in my hardware, save noise on less cooling being necessary when they run slower and save mother nature by using less electricity? I tried out some games after de-clocking (New term?) the GPU and I wasn't seeing any misaligned shadows, artifacts or vertical lines so my hypothesis is that it won't affect it negatively.

Almost all GPUs automatically clock back when they're idle. You can underclock (or de-clocking as you call it ;-) ) your CPU, but you won't save that much power by down that. Again, when the CPU is idle, it uses almost no power.
Technology has come a long way.

Computers draw about half as much power as you think. Just because you bought that new power supply doesn't mean your computer is wasting as much electricity as a microwave.

Even a core i7/295 only draws about 200 watts from the PSU at idle, and doesn't need more than 500 at load. Either way, the underclocking you do wouldn't affect your consumption much at idle; not enough to show up on your electricity bill.

Supa kewl.

Also, I think Samsung makes good drives, tehy're pretty fast and doesn't afraid of anything.

New computer build

I'm building a value computer for girlfriend for uni, with a target budget of £300, and have gotten this together:

AMD Athlon X2 Dual Core 7850+ Black Edition 2.8Ghz
Gigabyte GA-M720-US3 PCI-Express DDR2 Mobo
OCZ StealthXStream 500W Silent P.Supply
Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB SATA-II 16Mb Cache
Kingston HyperX 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 6400 800MHz Dual Channel
LG GH22NS30 22x DVD+/-RW SATA Dual Layer
Asus TA-8H3 Case Midi Tower Case
OcUK GeForce 9600 GT 1024MB GDDR33 PCI-Express

£292.52

This is to upgrade (without spending lots of money) from a shitty computer using an Intel Celeron 2GHz processor, with (and this is a big WTF?) 256Mb RAM, with on-board graphics etc :P

At 7/10/09 09:26 AM, dELtaluca wrote: This is to upgrade (without spending lots of money) from a shitty computer using an Intel Celeron 2GHz processor, with (and this is a big WTF?) 256Mb RAM, with on-board graphics etc :P

my old pc was very similar to this, soooo damn sloow....

I always wanted to know is sli or crossfire worth it? and i was thinkin about upgrading my 9800gtx+ later on and i heard about using a gfx card for physX is that worth it??

thanks

At 7/10/09 09:39 AM, BORKOYz wrote:

I always wanted to know is sli or crossfire worth it?

That depends on your needs. I've seen a modest 4770 crank up Crysis pretty high, and my single 280 can get all very high at 2560x1600, without AA of course.

Dual card setups don't scale linearly, meaning your frame rates won't double if you drop in a second card. Adding a second card might give you say, 50% higher fps, and then that 3rd card would add 20.

How well the cards scale is dependent on your CPU, which to oversimplify, supplies the graphics cards with information to render. i7 really shines in a multi-GPU set up, especially when overclocked, but a C2D or a PhII clocked to around 4ghz will also do a fine job.

physX is that worth it??

PhysX is a gimmick, the only programs that even use it are 3Dmark vantage and Mirror's edge.

At 7/10/09 09:26 AM, dELtaluca wrote: New computer build

Not sure but you could probably track down a 512mb 9600gt for a little less. Other than that, great!

Three dollars.

Not bad for a 5 year old processor with astock Intel fan. Sucked an additional 1144Mhz from each core.

At 7/11/09 10:41 PM, Tehpivot wrote: Three dollars.

Hot damn. Is that board am2?

At 7/12/09 02:38 AM, PolishMatt wrote: Not bad for a 5 year old processor with astock Intel fan. Sucked an additional 1144Mhz from each core.

If you've got the taste of OCing in your blood, pick up a half decent cooler for 20 bucks. Those pentiums can hit a busspeed of around 300 before you need a huge voltage bump to get more.

At 7/12/09 11:02 AM, ThoseSneakyFrench wrote:

At 7/11/09 10:41 PM, Tehpivot wrote: Three dollars.

Hot damn. Is that board am2?

It's a Pentium 4, we don't know if it's 2 or 1 core, it currently has a Radeon graphics card (One of the new ones, I can't remember which) that I got for a dollar. All I need is a CPU fan and some RAM and I'm ready to go.

At 7/12/09 11:38 AM, Tehpivot wrote:

At 7/12/09 11:02 AM, ThoseSneakyFrench wrote:

At 7/11/09 10:41 PM, Tehpivot wrote: Three dollars.

Hot damn. Is that board am2?

It's a Pentium 4, we don't know if it's 2 or 1 core, it currently has a Radeon graphics card (One of the new ones, I can't remember which) that I got for a dollar. All I need is a CPU fan and some RAM and I'm ready to go.

It's pretty cool to start stockpiling up parts. My uncle let me part out an entire 478 rig to ship up to my house. In addition, I've got 2 250W power supplies laying around.

Also, which is better. Core i7 or PhII and SSD raid 0?

Another shot of the Radeon. WTF is it?

At 7/12/09 12:06 PM, ThoseSneakyFrench wrote: Also, which is better. Core i7 or PhII and SSD raid 0?

How are you suppose to compare a CPU to a (What's a Phil) and two SSDs?

At 7/12/09 12:19 PM, Tehpivot wrote: Another shot of the Radeon. WTF is it?

A graphics card? Or am I not reading between the lines?

At 7/12/09 11:38 AM, Tehpivot wrote: It's a Pentium 4, we don't know if it's 2 or 1 core

You mean - is it Hyper-Threaded or not. Pentium 4s are single cores. The fact that two separate CPU graphs shown in Task Manager, does not indicate that there are two separate cores; those are the two separate threads that come fourth with HT. If you want to know more about it, downloading CPU-Z. It should be able to tell you more information than you even need to know about the CPU.