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The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread
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AfterDawn Addict
4 product reviews
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26. February 2009 @ 20:34 |
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Originally posted by harvardguy:
the 3 fans seemed to be at the sound level of one 120mm fan many reviewers said.
How loud is a 120mm fan? How long is a piece of string?
Loud 120mm fans certainly do exist, so that doesn't really tlel us much.
The Sone is a useless measurement, it can't be compared to the decibel scale, and that's how AC get away with not having to post any noise levels of their products.
In general, 20 is ultra-quiet, 25 is quiet, 30 is about normal, 35 a bit on the noisy side, 40 and beyond would be considered loud. The Freezer 7 Pro cooler is about 38dB at full speed, Zalman coolers are about 40dB. The fans in the Antec 900 at max are abut 37dB. The HD4870X2 cooler at full speed is about 48dB.
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harvrdguy
Senior Member
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26. February 2009 @ 21:37 |
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Hmmmm. I had thought that 120mm fans - compared to 80 and 92 - were generally considered quiet. But I do have two of them going at 1600 rpm, and yes, I can hear them. The real noise though, comes from the hsf when the p4 gets hot.
Well, you'd have to glance through the newegg reviews - the overall tone of most of the reviews of the 3-fan asus is that it is fairly quiet - compared to the reference turbine design which you say is at 48 db. I guess some of them had friends with the standard sapphire or ati reference design board.
But for an additional $75, 8 heat pipes looks worth it to me, over the Asus with zero heat pipes, if the arctic performs as well as they say. One could pick up the bottom price design - take off the stock cooler - and pop the arctic on.
But I can see why you're waiting for an actual review of the product if the sone rating is useless.
By the way Sam, two boards producing 48 db each, equates to how many db total (I know it's not 96!) Does that get into the 55-60 db range?
Rich
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26. February 2009 @ 22:06 |
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Two boards at 48dB are 51dB, as the decibel scale doubles in noise for a 3dB increase.
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harvrdguy
Senior Member
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26. February 2009 @ 22:16 |
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Too noisy for you, I know that much.
I am having my catalyst nightmares again - everything crashes xp now. So 9.2 is not compatible with my 3850 card - I used driver clean and everything.
I'll take it off and put on an earlier catalyst.
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AfterDawn Addict
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26. February 2009 @ 22:19 |
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Unlucky. 9.2 has proven far more stable for me than 9.1.
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harvrdguy
Senior Member
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26. February 2009 @ 22:34 |
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I think I had 8. something - drivers only - worked great. This 3850 is nothing fancy - I'll just go back to when they had that working smoothly, and try to get catalyst to work this time. The only problem I had before was 3dmark6 - now even just running a quicktime movie to test the osd placement crashes the system. And when I went further into ATT - it couldn't find the hardware for the fan profile - that tells me something right there I suppose.
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26. February 2009 @ 22:39 |
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Hmm, I can't really explain that.
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harvrdguy
Senior Member
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26. February 2009 @ 22:43 |
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I was running the drivers only from 8.10. With Catalyst installed I couldn't get 3dmark to run at the time - in November. But now with driver clean, maybe it will work.
I'll try 9.2 one more time, before I give up on it.
Oh, catalyst oh catalyst - you bitch! LOL
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26. February 2009 @ 23:04 |
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Heh, don't be quite so hard, amazingly, I haven't had quite as many issues, and I'm using the vista version!
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harvrdguy
Senior Member
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26. February 2009 @ 23:10 |
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Hah, hah. Actually it is appearing to be a problem between Ati tray tools and catalyst. I might need to get over to ati tray tools and get the latest version. This time with 9.2 I left ati tray tools installed. Each time I go into it to exit - system crashes. I haven't tested for fan profiles yet. But that makes me think there is a basic incompatibility there. I use ati tray tools to overclock the 3850 gpu and memory.
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4 product reviews
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26. February 2009 @ 23:16 |
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I had big issues with ATT and Vista64 due to insigned drivers, so I don't use it. I see no reason to use it really, GPU-Z gives me more stats, Catalyst is fine for overclocking and fan control.
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harvrdguy
Senior Member
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26. February 2009 @ 23:33 |
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You might have a point. I never used catalyst - I liked ATT when I learned to use it a few years ago, and I like the on-screen display. But I have to say I haven't given the more modern catalysts a try.
So I am going to remove Ati Tray Tools for now - I'll leave the registry settings just in case. I did find the newest ATT - I'm several revisions behind - and Ray updated it just a few days ago - so it's new as of the CCC 9.2. In uninstalling ATT just now, again the system crashed. So this isn't a fair test of 9.2 - there is some incompatibility with the version of ATT that I had been running.
I'll get ATT completely off, driver clean, put 9.2 on, boot up a couple of times until it stabilizes - takes at least twice to get the font sizes correct - and then see if 3dmark6 runs. Then I'll know catalyst is okay, and then I'll try the newest version of ATT - 1382 (I'm running 1368.)
OK - I have a bad feeling about 9.2. I'm booting up again to make sure it's cleanly installed - but I looked at catalyst just now and the fan slider control is missing - that's the same thing I experienced with ATT - it found no fan under CCC 9.2.
Well, the computer booted, and I tried dxdiag - and it DID find hardware acceleration - the quicktime movie didn't crash - and 3dmark6 is running right now. (There is a little revolving thing over the door that opens later in the attack which I never noticed before. You don't miss anything on the BIG SCREEN lol.) I'll let 3dmark6 finish and see if I get my 4800+ score from November. Well, no, I won't, because that was with graphics hardware acceleration. Maybe I'll get around 4300.
By the way, the CCC talks about a fan slider to set the fan speed - and leave it set at that speed. My CCC doesn't show a fan slider, so I need ATT for that function. I like better how ATT allows not just a manual fan speed setting like that, but you can also set variable fan settings depending on the temperature in 7 discrete steps - as temps rise the fan speed goes up - obviously IMO that's a more clever way to do it. If 3dmark6 works, I'll install the latest version of ATT - if it finds the fan I'm in business - if not I'm dropping back to CCC 8.10.
I need some kind of fan control, the default Ati on-board setting allows the card to run really hot in the 90s, all the time.
Holy smokes, no ATT, no acceleration: 3dmark6 at 5116! (Don't laugh all you 15,000 - 22,000 types!) I guess 9.2 is a better set of drivers.
I just loaded the newest ATT - it found the fan and I have full fan control - it pulled all my settings where I had left them in the registry - one of the uninstall options. I'll implement my auto overclocking and run 3dmark6 again I guess.
I did, it dropped to 4910, with overclocking!! Hmmmm. What the hell?
Not sure what that means but the number is back to the 4850 or so level where it used to be. Maybe the first score was just an anomaly. I think I'll exit ATT, which will stop overclocking, and also stop the on-screen display and background task, and see what the third run produces. Third run with no ATT, stock settings, is 5066.
So acceleration reduces 3dmark6 scores!!! (Or running att reduces 3dmark6 scores.) Makes no sense. Sam or Jeff, you have a theory about that? Shaff doesn't put much stock in 3dmark6 as an indicator of game playing power - maybe all this means is that it gives you a rough indication, but 200 points over 5,000 is 4% - so 3dmark6 is a good system power indicator, plus or minus 5%. Maybe that's what it all means.
Finally, I am turning off att, then using catalyst to increase the gpu clock from stock 668 to max 720 (vs 769-att at my most conservative and very stable overclock profile setting) and increase memory from stock 840 to max 950 (vs 945-att on my stable overclocking profile). This will give me some CCC acceleration - not as much as with att.
THE RESULTS ARE IN: The new CCC-only accelarated score is: 5086, and another run with CCC stock settings, no acceleration, produces 5066. (So the 5166 of the very first run is gone. Maybe some background tasks have kicked in. I haven't used End-it-all which punkbuster told me about, to kill all the killable threads.) Trying once more with ATT turned on and normal acceleration, drops me to 4858.
So, running ATT, accelerated or not, costs me 200 points. What is going on? I thought Ati Tray Tool didn't use virtually any system resources. Well, maybe with my weak p4, I am affected more than normal core 2 duo or quad cpus.
If I take the scores literally - if 3dmark6 is spot-on indicative of real-world, then I am better off not accelerating the gpu. But obviously that can't be correct! I ran 3dmark6 several more times, same thing. Consistently about 200 points less when ATT is loaded and running, and with ATT accelerated versus non-accelerated, very slight difference in score - less than 1% difference.
My conclusion is that 3dmark6 is plus or minus 5% a good indicator of game-playing performance - it's a rough tool - you can't worry about 5%. Anybody have some differing opinions?
DESPITE THE WEIRD 3DMARK6 SCORES, AND NO FAN SLIDER, I LIKE CATALYST!
I'm glad I installed 9.2 - After all that trouble and multiple 3dmark6 runs, I decided to play some more Medal of Honor, with proper aspect ratio.
I scaled up Pacific Assault for a couple hours at 4:3 full screen height, with black borders on each side. As I thought, totally immersive still and you don't even notice the borders. Everybody got back to full height, lol.
Sam, thanks for the tip about the aspect ratio. CCC works very simply and cleanly - you can alt Tab to CCC, change it - alt Tab back - and see the difference immediately. I also tried the letterbox at true 1600x1200 1:1 pixel matching - not bad at all - very crisp of course - but full height looked excellent. Everything got slightly taller and looked really good.
For the time being I have disabled overclocking the gpu - the 3D profile is the same as the 2D profile - but I can change that back instantly in ATT. I have 3 overclocking profiles, but the most conservative is very stable - and overclocks 8% more than CCC allows, 769 on clocks whereas CCC maxes at 720.
For games that tax the gpu at near 100% (per the Ati Tray Tool onscreen display which shows me fps, cpu %load, gpu %load, as well as gpu temp and fan speed) I'll use the 3d accelerated profile, despite what 3dmark6 is telling me, and see what that does to gpu %load utilization.
Rich
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 27. February 2009 @ 18:00
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AfterDawn Addict
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28. February 2009 @ 11:45 |
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I can't explain why the fan control slider goes missing, but you don't need to use ATT for fan control, RivaTuner will do it, and as far as I'm concerned, will do a better job of it.
I use Rivatuner primarily because it is compatible with Vista64, ATI Tray Tools is not.
Also don't forget Auto fan speed is designed to run graphics cards up to about 90ºC. That's perfectly normal, and under normal circumstances will not cause crashes.
As far as 3dmark dropping with an OC goes, that's very common, 3dmark scores do slowly degrade if you run them several times in succession, and there is also significat variance between the tests. You should also be closing every background application before runing the test.
With a P4, a program as simple as TrayTools will significantly hurt your CPU score.
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Senior Member
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28. February 2009 @ 14:01 |
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I just got my evga gtx 260 and so far it is awesome. I have it overclocked to 680/1500/2120 and it gets 16802 in 3dmark 06. But I have not been able to get ati tool to work so i can get the temp. I am running windows server 2008 64bit and i am having trouble getting the driver it needs to load. So what program do you guys use to see gpu temp in 64bit windows?
GAMING COMPUTER - Intel q9550 @ 3.4ghz | EVGA GTX 260 core 216 | Gigabyte ds3l | 6gb Gskill DDR2 800 ram | Silverstone 700 watt psu | WD 640gb hdd | Seagate 300gb hdd | LG dvd burner | Samsung dvd burner | Antec p182 case | logitech 2.1 speakers | logitech g11 keyboard | Samsung 25.5in 1900x1200 monitor | 19in 1440x900 secondary monitor | Windows 7 64bit | SERVER - Gigabyte 785g motherboard | AMD Phenom 9650 | 6gb ram | three 1.5tb hdd | Seagate 1tb hdd | WD 750gb hdd | two 300gb hdd | Maxtor 200gb hdd | Ark rackmount case | CentOS 5.5
Steam name = "krj15489" alias = Jordan-k
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AfterDawn Addict
4 product reviews
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28. February 2009 @ 14:20 |
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harvrdguy
Senior Member
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28. February 2009 @ 17:39 |
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Yeah, Krj, I think Ati tray tools is just for Ati graphics cards - probably won't run for any of the nvidia products. Nice 3dmark6 at over 16,000.
Sam, thanks for the reminder about Riva Tuner. (Krj - Riva works for nvidia cards.) I forgot about it. I have never tried it, although I have heard a lot about it. If Ray Adam's ATT doesn't work for Vista, that's what I'll have to use. Yeah, I guess I was expecting too much out of 3dmark6. Is the steadily decreasing test score a function of xp memory leakage? I guess one should really reboot each time and close all background tasks, if one wants to try to achieve duplicable scores.
My real estate deal is almost dead - if it revives itself it will be a miracle - I'll know for sure next week. So it is very likely you'll be hearing from me about how loud the 4850x2 really is, lol. Hopefully with that board and the Q9400 from microcenter, currently priced below the Q6600, I'll get scores somewhere around what Krj is getting - maybe with a little bit of Q9400 overclocking (as long as I don't exceed my 75 watts of psu headroom.)
Rich
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 28. February 2009 @ 19:34
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AfterDawn Addict
4 product reviews
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28. February 2009 @ 19:12 |
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The decreasing score is just part of 3dmark06.
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harvrdguy
Senior Member
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28. February 2009 @ 19:30 |
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Originally posted by sammorris:
The decreasing score is just part of 3dmark06.
Hahahaha. Yeah, Sam, but why???
I could see it if you were accessing the web as you ran the program - well maybe you are. But I actually think I left my ethernet unplugged for a while there since that was what driver clean asked me to do. If you went out to the internet each time, maybe Futuremark would discourage you from running it all the time, for whatever reason - "ok guys enough epeen!"
But when you're running it on your local machine, and scores steadily drop, I think I would have to attribute that to the famous XP memory leakage, which I think means XP holding onto some main memory and paging memory in case you run the application again, resulting somehow in less memory next time. Or....maybe 3dmark6 leaves some threads running each time, increasing total running threads every time you use it if you don't reboot.
Let me ask you a different way Sam - I'm just curious. In your opinion, if I were to reboot each time, and kill all background tasks each time, could I reasonably expect duplicability on my 3dmark6 scores, would you think?
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AfterDawn Addict
4 product reviews
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28. February 2009 @ 22:00 |
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That's not how it's worked for me, and I can't explain it either.
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28. February 2009 @ 22:18 |
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ati tool actually does work with nvidia cards. i used it with my 7600gt and 8800gt for monitoring temps and light overclocking. the fuzzy cube was also very useful for scanning for artifacts. but it seems to have trouble with 64bit so i will use gpu z for temps and riva tuner for my overclocking.
GAMING COMPUTER - Intel q9550 @ 3.4ghz | EVGA GTX 260 core 216 | Gigabyte ds3l | 6gb Gskill DDR2 800 ram | Silverstone 700 watt psu | WD 640gb hdd | Seagate 300gb hdd | LG dvd burner | Samsung dvd burner | Antec p182 case | logitech 2.1 speakers | logitech g11 keyboard | Samsung 25.5in 1900x1200 monitor | 19in 1440x900 secondary monitor | Windows 7 64bit | SERVER - Gigabyte 785g motherboard | AMD Phenom 9650 | 6gb ram | three 1.5tb hdd | Seagate 1tb hdd | WD 750gb hdd | two 300gb hdd | Maxtor 200gb hdd | Ark rackmount case | CentOS 5.5
Steam name = "krj15489" alias = Jordan-k
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AfterDawn Addict
4 product reviews
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28. February 2009 @ 22:49 |
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ATITool does work for nvidia, but only older cards. It does not even support current ATI hardware, hence why people switched to ATI Tray Tools. The latter is incompatible with Vista64 though. Only Rivatuner (after some tweaking) seems to work with Vista64.
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harvrdguy
Senior Member
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1. March 2009 @ 01:04 |
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Wait guys, Sam and Krj - are we saying Ati Tray Tools and ATI Tools are two different utilities? I thought there was only one thing - ATT, which stands for Ati Tray Tools. Sorry for my confusion and erroneous information.
Wow, I finally went over to that website you gave us, Sam, interfacelift.com, with the 2560x1600 wallpaper. It took me 20 minutes to go back and find your link. I was too busy to bookmark it at the time, duhhh. (By the way, the website crashed internet explorer 7 several times for some reason - I went back to it on Mozilla and it worked fine, plus the downloads came down as jpgs instead of bmp files.)
Anyway, what a treasure! I sorted by widescreen, 2560x1600, and there were 801 photos. Two hours later I had picked out 71 favorites, of which 50 survived the selection process when I actually displayed them on the big Dell.
(I repeat, if anybody wants the small 1.5mb exe of the original free webshots, before they messed it up, let me know. It stores the wallpapers as thumbnails, changing them hourly, daily, weekly, or never, and also serves as your screensaver.)
I had picked out the photos on my 17" Sony CRT, which is my everyday computer that I am on right now. But the photos absolutely EXPLODED with rich color and high def presence on the 30" Dell.
I swear, all I could think of was the very strange thought: "Sam you SOB - you held out on us for all those years - not really letting us in on how fabulous the 30" experience really is" Hahahahaha.
One of the first ones I tried out on the 30" monitor was "space needle" - a gorgeous shot of Seattle with the magnificent Space Needle front and center. The detail and variety of colors is just amazing! The power of that one shot convinced me to pour through all 801 selections.
I even ended up registering with interfacelift.com because I wanted to post a comment under "Tree Snake on Branch" - a decent (but not spectacular - I kept it anyway) picture of an emerald green tree boa that I actually owned in high school. If you do a quick search for "tree snake" you'll find the picture and my longish (yeah Ray what of it heh) comment on the bottom about buying and owning that snake. I was a big reptile fanatic in my day!
Did I read at one time that there are actually no snakes at all in the British Isles? (No - wrong again - I googled, there are all of 3 snake species, one of them the poisonous adder. Not an abundance of snakes to be sure, but more than zero!!)
Rich
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AfterDawn Addict
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1. March 2009 @ 01:11 |
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Haha yeah, well, how else could I have better put it in words? :)
ATI Tray Tools, and ATITool are two separate programs, ATI Tray Tools is more modern and complex, but I've never tried it myself. ATITool is pretty redundant nowadays apart from the fuzzy cube artifact check, which only works with one GPU, and doesn't do anything 3dmark won't as far as stability testing goes.
You were almost right Rich, but there are no snakes in Ireland. (or so I read) There are some in Britain, however, though grass snakes and adders are as bad as it gets, and I'm pretty sure I've never seen an adder.
http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/Reptil...elandsnakes.cfm
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 1. March 2009 @ 01:12
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AfterDawn Addict
15 product reviews
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2. March 2009 @ 01:09 |
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Okay so I finally got FEAR 2 installed yesterday and I've played maybe 6 hours total of the campaign. So I'll just score it out.
Graphics: 9/10
Project Origin uses the same Lithtech engine as FEAR and the base geometry and texture detail seems mostly unchanged. Not that this is a bad thing. The original was very sharp in this regard. But the shader effects have been upped significantly as well as the environmental detail and visual "clutter". Blur, motion blur, depth of field, better water and fire, noticeably more detailed lighting, more objects, particles and the like. It looks more visually spectacular and detailed as a whole and is a marked improvement from the original. The screen is much more visually "busy" at any given time compared to the original. It comes very close to being a Crysis killer in many spots. There are no rough areas to speak of either.
Basically they took FEAR 1 and turned the special effects way up past ridiculous. Lots of visual splendor to be had in this game.
Gameplay: 7.5/10
FEAR 2 is slightly worse than the original, IMO, gameplay wise. The original perfected small engagements and gave them that subtle "cat and mouse" like tension. FEAR 2 throws more enemies at you and it quickly devolves into an average "run and gun" shooter. Some creepy new enemy types lose their shock factor quickly by being really easy to kill and too slow to keep themselves out of sight. Solid shooting and "create your own cover" mechanics make up for this though by making the firefights fun nonetheless.
The "scary" parts are much less subtle as well as being too often so they don't give me that eerie spine tingling sensation like the original did. The game is still scary as all hell though and a fair few parts will have your heart pounding.
The level design could also use some work as I find myself lost or turned around frequently. This was much the same for FEAR but it is more noticeable in FEAR 2. And some of the engagements feel too "big" for the space they're in. Like they just throw too many enemies in at once and the area feels crowded.
Performance: 10/10
Simply spectacular. Any recent video card paired with just about any dual core processor can max this game. It plays all maxed on the 9600GT and AMD X2 at 3.2GHz with 2xAA and 16xAF at 1680 x 1050. Averaging about 45FPS with little to no lag whatsoever. The motion blur is spectacular for keeping <60FPS nice and smooth.
Using the latest Cat 9.2 drivers gives excellent near 100% Crossfire scaling. All maxed at 1920 x 1200 with 8xQAA and 16xAF is buttery smooth on the Crossfire rig. Averaging over 140FPS with zero lag and minimal loading pauses. I see no issues to be had if you're running at 2560 res, even with heavy AA.
This game seems to heavily favor ATI hardware. Firingsquad performance results showing comparable ATI cards stomping their Nvidia counterparts badly. The HD4870 actually outpaces the GTX280 in this game, if I've read correctly.
Sound: 10/10
FEAR has always had very strong sound design, and the sequel is no different. The weapons sound effects are satisfyingly rich and hit my subwoofer just right. You can hear the vocal communication between the enemies just as well as you can hear the tell-tale "clink" of a grenade landing on the tile floor next to you. Sound also plays a huge factor in some of bigger set pieces. In particular, a falling train car in a collapsing subway tunnel had my whole room shaking as I heard every single piece of concrete and shattered glass fall around me.
Overall: 8.5/10
While FEAR 2 doesn't quite match up to the polish and suspense of the first game, it is still well worth your time. The visuals are stunning and some of the big scenes are absolutely incredible. The sometimes screwed level design and dumbed down combat are the only things keeping it from being one of my favorites for game of the year.
AMD Phenom II X6 1100T 4GHz(20 x 200) 1.5v 3000NB 2000HT, Corsair Hydro H110 w/ 4 x 140mm 1500RPM fans Push/Pull, Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5, 8GB(2 x 4GB) G.Skill RipJaws DDR3-1600 @ 1600MHz CL9 1.55v, Gigabyte GTX760 OC 4GB(1170/1700), Corsair 750HX
Detailed PC Specs: http://my.afterdawn.com/estuansis/blog_entry.cfm/11388This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 2. March 2009 @ 01:35
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AfterDawn Addict
4 product reviews
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2. March 2009 @ 11:47 |
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I think the textures have also been improved, personally. Not a huge amount, but enough to let the improvements to the postprocessing and pre-processing effects completely transform the game's graphics.
The gameplay is a mixed bag, as I agree the standard combat isn't quite the same but it does offer a similar level of combat strategy as the original, provided you play on Hard (anything but Hard is a joke). The sections with Alma were much less scary, and frankly disappointing, especially the 'hammer right click and left click' sections, as you'd still live even if you got them wrong, as simple as they were.
The genuinely scary sections though (the school, its underground section, and the area upstairs before you arrive at the nurse's office in particular) were fabulous. Genuinely sweat-breaking stuff on Hard.
Performance is good for the game, as I played it at 2560x1600 4xAA not even realising that there was no crossfire profile for it. (I played with 9.1, good to see they've added a profile for it now) The performance could be better at that setting before I'd call it smooth, but how many other games do you see running relatively well at 2560x1600 with AA on a single 4870 these days? FEAR always did run well on ATI hardware since the X1000 series, so the sequel should be no exception.
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