next »

[Please Support Us!]

Please Support Us!

Please help keep (=WDG=) alive

• Server rules
• Forum rules
• Join us
  
• Clan members
• About the clan
• Server stats
• WDG YouTube Channel
• WDG Downloads
• IRC Webchat

Steam groups:

• WDG community
• WDG clan group
• WDG Battlelog Platoon

Our allies:

• [NuB] TF2 clan
• Velocity Gamers Hub
• Destination Gamer

GoG Links:

• Wix Discord
• Wix IRC channel

TF2 Links:

• Official TF2 Blog
• TF2 Steam Forum
• The Fort 2

April 2024

Mo	Tu	We	Th	Fr	Sa	Su
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30
	Birthdays
Sk1nn3d (40)
	Upcoming Events
Upcoming Birthdays: Sk1nn3d (40)

[Omnipotens]

Though I'm a little late for launch of Bioshock Infinite (sadface), a friend of mine is selling me a GTX670 so I can push the glory. I'm getting a silly deal from him, half retail, making this insane bang for buck.

Initially I was looking at a 7970 - but at this price, with the option of waiting til the card is that price anyway, then going SLI, on top of the fact I want Bioshock Infinite to literally make me wet when I play it... how can I not? So I'll be running off tomorrow if possible to go pick up this beast.

Anyway, I'm currently running a Core i7 mostly at 3.60GHz, with the option of going beyond 4GHz from bios, but honestly, last time I benchmarked the OC to 4.2GHz, a minor OC to the 460 yielded better real world gains, so why stress the CPU?

My second PC is on loan to my housemate so he can try his hand at PC gaming. It's a quad core Q6600, with an ATI HD4800. Pretty much plays anything, with sacrifices at low res, which is fine cos his monitor is donkey balls anyway. This is OC'd and makes a fair bit of difference.

The base average for the Q660 with HD4800 in 3D Mark Vantage is around 5,000.
The base average for the i7 with the GTX460 in 3D Mark Vantage is around 20,000.

I was fairly surprised at the base average for the 460 in the Q660. It managed to pull a base average of 15,000. A 25% performance drop, at resolutions he can't run his games at, will probably pull that down to 15% loss. That's pretty bloody impressive for an 07 CPU vs an 09 CPU with much better backup components to boot.

Moral: don't be afraid of hardware that's now 6 years old, when you can back it up with a graphics card that in essence will end up costing you 25% more on your bang for buck. The loss does not equal (in this case) a new motherboard, CPU, SSD and RAM.

Moral 2: don't buy anything than a mid range i3 or i5 for gaming and back it up with a mid-high rage graphics card. This trend will continue, GPU power and RAM is where the market is at, 6 years and counting. Intel are big into mobile for a reason, the GPU's are taking the front running for now. Only buy more if you are a "performance" user. This means crunching numbers, databases, encoding video, all day.

[DeadlyAvenger]

Interesting read - I'm running a fairly early i7 (920) and my graphics card is now over 3 years old (5850) and there hasn't really been a game that I feel warrants an upgrade. It's starting to show it's age a little (things like only SATA-2 on the motherboard so not getting the most out of my SSDs).

I'm in a bit of an odd situation in that if I want to upgrade anything (CPU / GPU etc.) then it'll require a fairly major overhaul because of my watercooling - both the CPU and GPU are watercooled which means I'd need to buy new blocks (for either/both) if I upgrade them and those things are pretty pricey!

I want to get a new case as mine is starting to get a bit tatty but again - that means re-doing most of the watercooling and it seems that would be a good opportunity to upgrade - maybe just the graphics card this time around?!?

I did quite a lot of research into the latest AMD series cards - comparing the 660Ti to the 7850/7870 and 7950 - it seemed like the 7950 is the way to go for that sort of price range (which is more than I would usually spend). A lot of the reviews report around nvidia having more consistent frame times etc. but I don't know if that's that much of a problem when you can apparently overclock the 7950 to the performance of a £300+ graphics card.

For me - it feels like I'd be stepping down if I went from an i7 to an i5, even though I've heard fantastic things about the 3570K.

[Omnipotens]

Extra features are lustful, for sure. I dig that and I really like to push performance.

Thing is though, for gaming, there's no need. If you did go from a 920 to an i5, there would be gains on higher OC's due to the lower temps, but it's all peanuts compared to the GPU's boost.

I'd say go for the card. Easiest upgrade by far. Any be honest, other than for the porn, are you really going to notice the extra 5 seconds off a large level load time, or the few milliseconds you'll save opening that PDF - to justify a full upgrade?

The case is porn too. I like shiny, but there's something about that whole wolf in sheep's clothing thing. I remember being at some traffic lights when a porsche pulled up next to a rusty shitheap of a lada. The porsche gave it a shot, until the stupidly tuned up lada rinsed it.

The appeal of dragging a old steel IBM case to a LAN, popping it next to a machine with cathodes and water cooling - and keeping pace, has merit

[terror]

Deadly, the SATA2 for your SSD won't affect game performance (that's the access speeds) the only time that will make any noticeable difference would be when you're copying, but you're most likely to be limited by the other medium you're copying to/from (unless you have 2 SSDs).

Also, I've had the same case for 6 years (until the rig I got in January, which was because I gave liz my old one), I don't see the point in changing them TBH.

[Millicent Bystander]

I'm still running the Intel E8400 with 4Gb RAM from this post http://www.wdgclan.co.uk/index.php?topic=1781.0 (and the previous one too) and I added a Radeon 5770 and a 22" Monitor a couple of years later.  The PC is running everything I've thrown at it, even Planetside 2.  My next, much delayed upgrade is a SSD, more RAM and maybe a new case as my current one has been mauled by a toddler.

I reckon us owners of older PCs will start to struggle once the new generation of consoles are launched, but until then the kids get fed.

[Omnipotens]

FWIW, just dropped the GTX 670 in and it's giving me a 47% increase over the 460.

[Brahms]

now seems like a bad time to upgrade because of what millicent said about the next console cycle.

[LtMama]

In other news, decided my PC could do with a thorough clean, cant remember the last time I cleaned it. Was prompted by the fact whilst playing bioshock, the GPU gets up to 90 degrees C.

[hawt!]

New system should be here within the next few days, running a liquid cooled GTX 670 with an i5 3570k OC'ed @ 4.7GHZ, really can't wait to see how it performs.

Might pick up another 670 in the future and run in SLI when the prices drop down a little.

[terror]

My 3570K@4.2 with a 670 is running infinite on ultra at 1920x1200 at an average of about 85FPS. A lot of the time it's up to 120FPS but on occasion it'll drop to 70 or so, not really noticeable, wouldn't have any idea if it wasn't for FRAPS telling me that was the case (especially as my monitor only displays at 60Hz).

[DeadlyAvenger]

I'd say go for the card. Easiest upgrade by far. Any be honest, other than for the porn, are you really going to notice the extra 5 seconds off a large level load time, or the few milliseconds you'll save opening that PDF - to justify a full upgrade?

The case is porn too. I like shiny, but there's something about that whole wolf in sheep's clothing thing. I remember being at some traffic lights when a porsche pulled up next to a rusty shitheap of a lada. The porsche gave it a shot, until the stupidly tuned up lada rinsed it.

Well I half took up your advice and half ignored it.



Whoops! Got the stuff to re-do my watercooling loops with the graphics card on air. That seemed like the best upgrade path for me at the moment as like you said - my CPU is still pretty strong and to upgrade that is a major expense with the motherboard as well.

[discordance]

I also want an upgrade and am unconstrained by things such as understanding monetary value or saving money.

Dropping for 32gb of performance ram (currently on 6gb of value and I push it to the point it churns at times under heavy use) and a new gfx card should be enough. Realistically most of the problems I get on this pc would probably be fixed with new gfx and ram, buuut my 920 and motherboard have been iffy since the overclocking failed (which was under warranty but im such a lazy shit I never bothered sending it, also then i'd be computerless for a week or more.) I really should clean the whole thing and give the motherboard and overclocking a good going over but that is a lot of effort and I have so much else to do atm since moving. I'm pretty sure the bios also drops its settings periodically, which I can ignore now I gave up on the overclocking but it points to some underlying faults with the mobo (which I admittedly should have replaced under warranty when I had the chance). My sister also fried my old pc completely. Managed to melt the aux power supply into the motherboard. Would prefer the safety net of having a secondary pc for server use/media centre/spare parts etc.

Any thoughts generally? I get a bonus in June so i'm probably better off waiting on that and blowing that on a new build than using any buy now pay later stuff, so its going to be a few months before I do anything. At the same time though that makes me want to just do the gfx and ram now and potentially push this build a bit longer and ignore the mobo problems and hope nothing surfaces this year. Theres also hdd issues though, I need to expand my storage, and probably move my OS onto an SSD. Either way I need to move a bunch of stuff around and I dunno in my view if you are fiddling with the OS install and adding some pretty major components at the same time its probably time for a new build. But then i'm totally lazy and probably don't maintain very well.

[Zarf]

I'm still pretty happy with my i7 930 @4GHz and 5850. Same boat as deadly, I'd like proper SATA3 (It has it, but through a third party chip, so the performance is shit) Other than that It plays everything I throw at it, at high settings, 1920x1200 res. I've even clocked it back down to stock because CPU power makes fuck all difference to anything atm, anything remotely intensive I do is better running through a GPU anyway (Bitcoin mining, Folding, Transcoding). Intel would probably be in trouble if the masses realised that CPU's haven't been a bottleneck for years!

I have been tempted to get a new GPU and go eyefinity or a 27"1440p, just put together a system at work with a 27" Dell 1440p IPS monitor and it's sick. I really can't justify spending >£600 for the amount I use my gaming PC nowadays though! Most of the time I'm using my HTPC (Dual Core E6600, 4GB, SSD) which is quick enough for browsing and watching vids from bed.  I'll probably wait for the retail Occulus Rift and jump into that if it looks like it's getting enough developer support.

Recent spends have all been storage, 256GB Samsung 840 (£120 on amazon, bargain) to replace my RAID0 80GB intels in the gaming PC, New hardware RAID controller (£60 PERC6/i) for my server as my old one(PERC5/i) was dying (would drop off with firmware errors after sustained heavy activity until the server was rebooted), a few 3TB drives to back everything up on whilst I switchover (going to replace the 8 aging 1TB drives with 5 2TB drives from my backup server, then move the 3TB's in there). Not sure what to do with the 1TB's yet, could probably sell them on for nearly what I paid because HDD prices (even for second hand out of warranty ones) are silly. Too lazy for that though so I expect i'll trow together some RAID 1's or 10's and use them for local backups on my gaming machine and a media server at my parents (in my old Q6600 gaming machine that's been gathering dust).

I've picked up a couple of 10Gb infiniband adaptors and a "crossover" style cable for them so I can have a 10Gb network between my main server and gaming PC, (£50 total, mainly for shits and giggles than any actual need for it)

[DeadlyAvenger]

Finished my new build:
http://imgur.com/a/HR6uv

Shows a few photos of the old/new setup. I had a leak when I first started filling in, which made me panic in a big way - fortunately it was only a fairly small leak and I didn't have to spend tooooo long wiping the blue off of everything. Turns out I had accidentally crushed one of the fittings trying to remove it so it didn't fit correctly.

I bought UV tubing - which actually looks really good, much better than using UV fluid which is what I did before.

Also - I was really surprised at how much the dye from my old fluid had transferred itself onto the tubing - you can see how much one on of the pictures where it was over the fitting. Gunk gunk gunk.

[Berath]

The time has come for me to take another look at my desktop.

For ages now I've been gaming on my laptop...laptop on knee, mouse on sofa cushion; the true pro setup. Basically the room where my desktop is, has been a cold tip and I haven't wanted to drag myself away from my cozy front room.

Now, I've sorted it out and it's ready to go. I've upgraded my monitor..I decided to go for a Dell Ultrasharp U2412M 24 inch, not the best gaming monitor perhaps but I'm incredibly anal about picture quality and that came out at about the best with an IPS screen. The response time is high but the input lag came out pretty low in test (and IPS screens react differently to TN screens) so I reckoned it was okay for my purposes. I don't think I'll be playing prem e-sports anytime soon when rapid response times and 120Hz might come in handy. My old second monitor is now in the downstairs toilet. My old primary monitor is now my second monitor, a decent 21 inch Samsung.

But my old graphics card just isn't up to it. It's an Nvidia Geforce 260 gtx (2009!). It the re-release version with an increased number of cores, but it didn't make any difference. Planetside 2 still struggled (I could play it but I WANT EYE CANDY) and I couldn't watch Abda's last vods of KCaLtL fullscreen. Intolerable #firstworldproblems.

So I'm looking at a new card. It looks like I'm homing in on this one: Sapphire 11196-09-40G HD7950 3GB Vapox-X. Price is about as much as I want to pay. Reviews are good. I like the idea of it running cool and quiet with oc potential over and above the boost; though I'm not much of an overclocker. The 3GB gives it plenty of headroom running 2 monitors at decent setting, particularly as I'll only be gaming on the main one.

The next thing is the mobo and processor. I've got a intel core 2 duo e8400 (same as Milli!)so that means the whole lot will need to be replaced so that will have to wait a while, moneywise. I reckon it should be okay though it will stop the card runnng at it's full potential for the more demanding games (though if it runs Planetside for Milli....).

Anyhow, any thoughts on card, processor etc welcome.  I've read what everyone else has said and it's interesting.