My hardware woes: So you don't feel so bad about yours

[Jofaba]

Re: My hardware woes: So you don't feel so bad about yours

I hope it's not the psu. I love my Hiper-R. I love how the modular design looks and functions. However, as far as whether it's good enough, comparing your computer to mine isn't the best test. I have two videocards and more drives (plus a water cooling pump). But I don't think even weak amperage would give low fps. I think the problems would be more pronounced and not simply a peformance hit.

Ouch.. start from scratch and stock? I suppose I can do that heh. I'll wait until my Opteron arrives though. I have a lot of work to do this weekend for Totalbf2.com so I won't be doing much benchwork this weekend (that's a lie. But I won't do anything that will comprimise the ability to boot up and play a game, so no messing with the internals this weekend).

I've actually already removed a videocard. I need to focus on my work right now and try to not worry about the computer. I'll just hope and prey that it's a cpu cache issue.

I just had a thought. Wouldn't it be hiliarious if it turned out to be the fact that I'm playing my games at 1600x1200 with a 85hz refresh rate, and it's that refresh rate that's giving the peformance hit? And the 60hz of an lcd would fix the problem? I never even looked into that. I will when I get home, but I doubt the monitor's refresh rate matters much. Otherwise, wouldn't all the SLi guides mention it?

Please let it be cpu!

[imported_Wreck]

Re: My hardware woes: So you don't feel so bad about yours

I wasn't comparing my PC to yours, but the Silverstone should be more than enough to run your PC or mine. The current generation of PSU's are having a hard time keeping up with all these drives and graphics cards including OCZ and other top brands which is why I suggested the newly released, very beefy Silverstone Zeus PSU.

You can't go wrong with quad 18A 12v rails.

I doubt it's the CPU.

[[2bit]Modmaven]

Re: My hardware woes: So you don't feel so bad about yours

My two cents....I read an article recently about those video cards you have, and it said they run pretty dang hot. You may want to open up coolbits and clock it down to standard 7900gt speeds and see what happens.

Also, try lowering that resolution and comparing your rig to other benchmarks to see if it is way off.

[Sir. bzb]

Re: My hardware woes: So you don't feel so bad about yours

I just had a thought. Wouldn't it be hiliarious if it turned out to be the fact that I'm playing my games at 1600x1200 with a 85hz refresh rate, and it's that refresh rate that's giving the peformance hit? And the 60hz of an lcd would fix the problem? I never even looked into that. I will when I get home, but I doubt the monitor's refresh rate matters much. Otherwise, wouldn't all the SLi guides mention it?

Hmm, dual 7800GT's at 2560x1600 with the goodys up full in BF2 manage at least 30fps @60hz (without onscreen action). 1600x900 goodys up and no action is at least 85fps (60hz).
I suppose you are asking for something to be displayed 85 times a second however its far to late and Grolsch is far to nice for me to consider whether the monitor is fed the frames or remembers the old one until a new one turns up so i will see if the answer is located in the bottom of this tin instead.

[Jofaba]

Re: My hardware woes: So you don't feel so bad about yours

I was talking about the other guy. Sorry, long day at work today and too lazy to hit my back key and see who I'm talking about. The other guy who has the Hiper-R.

So I'm back to the same dilemma I've had since the very beginning. Half the people think it's my cpu, and half think its the psu.

I think I chose a very bad time to try and give up drinking

[imported_Wasp]

Re: My hardware woes: So you don't feel so bad about yours

3DMark01 SE, Super PI, Prime95 and PCMark are all good tests for your CPU. If it doesn't work properly you will soon find it out with one of those. I still use 3DMark01 a lot because it shows more of the performance of the CPU and memory than the later versions. My current score in 3DMark01 is 28300.

When I tune my system I spend a lot of time with the BIOS. Especially memory timings. For instance most BIOS'es sets the Command Rate to 2T by default. That takes off nearly 1000MB/sec of memory performance right there. This setting usually only works with 1 or 2 memory sticks so that's why I bought 2x1 GB OCZ ram and took out my 2x512MB. My ram currently runs at 500Mhz with the CPU at 2.75Ghz (Venice 3000+).

I'm curious how your system performs in 3DMark01 compared to mine. You have better 3D cards but otherwise we are close (MSI K8N Platinum SLI - 7800GT OC 470/1200 - Venice 3000+ OC 2.75Ghz - 2x1GB OCZ XTC OC 500Mhz 3-4-3-8 1T command - Samsung 120GB + Seagate Barracuda 200GB IDE in RAID).

[kingdomwinds]

Re: My hardware woes: So you don't feel so bad about yours

I only get avg of 50ish at 1600x1200 HQ in bf2. BF2:SF is unplayable at that resolution for me. I get massive frame drops for a few sec while i turn around or change directions in special forces. I just think that bf2 is badly made.

There is no reason why my 7900 GT sli should not be able to run special forces smoothly. I might ending up selling one 7900 GT because SLI seems to suck

[GeneralHavic]

Re: My hardware woes: So you don't feel so bad about yours

You got a point there kingdomwinds, BF2 was poorly made. Being made off of the Direct3D engine was a real mistake. Direct3D is one hell of a system hog, and BF2 is a massive game, put two and two to together and you've got a game that puts your system to a big stress test.

I feel your pains though Jofaba, as I have explained before. My system is, by todays standards, subpar. An AMD 3000+ running stock (out of fear I may have heating issues with my poor cooling solution if I attempt to overclock), only 1GB of Corsair (value RAM...sad I know), and a 4 year old IDE Maxtor 60 GB hard drive (salvaged from my last poor computer) just aren't good enough at all for gaming needs today. The only thing that is saving me from this wreck is my X1800XT, but everything else in my system bottlenecks the thing so I don't get all the performance out of it. It's my first ATI card, and working with Catalyst Control Center was a bit confusing when I needed to update my drivers. The first time I updated my drivers I never uninstalled my old ones....wow did I have terrible performance. I'm not sure of the reasons, but I almost wanted to sell the thing. But I figured it all out TODAY, and I'm finally playing better.

I'll pray for the both of us Jofaba. I've got a system I'm working up to getting. It'll be a long stretch for me but I do hope you solve your problems soon.

[Jofaba]

Re: My hardware woes: So you don't feel so bad about yours

Well I took advantage of my cloudy morning mind and bought the Opteron 165 as soon as I woke up. I'm hoping to get it by Friday. The only stuff left after that is psu and ram. But if the processor doesn't bring joy to my life, I'll probably just start selling parts of the computer off, like the liquid cooling and second videocard (and the new processor unless it proves itself). Wish me luck...

[imported_Wreck]

Re: My hardware woes: So you don't feel so bad about yours

Jofaba, before you install the processor please note the stepping and post it up here for us.

[imported_-=AJ06=-]

Re: My hardware woes: So you don't feel so bad about yours

Well I took advantage of my cloudy morning mind and bought the Opteron 165 as soon as I woke up. I'm hoping to get it by Friday. The only stuff left after that is psu and ram. But if the processor doesn't bring joy to my life, I'll probably just start selling parts of the computer off, like the liquid cooling and second videocard (and the new processor unless it proves itself). Wish me luck...

Are you minted or what?
You seem to buy new stuff every day :)

[Jofaba]

Re: My hardware woes: So you don't feel so bad about yours

No, I'm not rich anymore. I used to be though. Now I get $9.25/h and since I get paid every 2 weeks I get taxed harder. So I actually make less than that.

I'll definately note the stepping. =)

[imported_-=AJ06=-]

Re: My hardware woes: So you don't feel so bad about yours

lol your 2 GFX cards are worth pretty much as much as my system

[Jofaba]

Re: My hardware woes: So you don't feel so bad about yours

Resurrection! Both of this thread and my computer.

Well I installed the Opteron 165 and so far I've seen quite a bit of a peformance boost. It's pretty cool being able to alt+tab out of a game and watch a movie, then go back in without any problems.

I really haven't had a chance to benchmark yet, and just to save time (depends on how you look at it I guess), I'm going to do a fresh install of windows when I get home from work today. There seems to be some disagreement about whether this is necissary, but I accidently installed BF2 on my OS partition and have less than 1gb left anyway, and from my experience if you install a piece of software over the old stuff, when you're partitioned, it just replaces the reg files and goes pretty quickly, and keeps your settings (in most programs).

Anyway, I got a real bad stomach flu the day the processor was being delivered so I had to go home early, and had to wait to the next day to pick it up from work. So, I was really excited and forgot to check my stepping! I was going to remove the cpu block today but I think I'll just wait a couple weeks because I'm going to be adding my videocards to the water loop and I'll be removing it then anyway.

So far I've got the cpu's overclocked to 2.745ghz currently. I'm having some problems overclocking that are confusing me though. I can't seem to go higher than this. I either can't load into Windows, but it almost seems like a memory issue. If I lower my mem to 100, I can overclock higher. If I go to 133 I can't get into windows. If I go to 166 I can go into windows again, but my ram's severely overclocked and thus I can't overclock much higher. I don't know if it's my HT, which is a 10multiplier to my cpu core frequency, while my overclock is a 9 (because opty165 is 1.8ghz stock). However I have my LDT at 2 right now because I'm trying to get to 2.9ghz. After a fresh Windows install, and probably a bios flash just to make everything clean, I'll try again.

So far though, some significant peformance boost. It definately seems like my cpu was bottlenecking the cards some. COD2 still has low framerates but I'm starting to think that's a settings issue because I went from strange BF2 peformance to doing pretty good.

With one card, I'd get l like 80fps. With two, I'd get closer to 50. Now I get a pretty solid 120fps all maxed out and 1600x1200. And I gained almost 1,400 points on 3dmark05, bringing my score to 4 points from being a nice healthy 14,100.

My new goal is 15,000 and 10,000 in 3DMARK06. I'll update this thread after my fresh install and see how things are going with my overclock. Once I've peaked out, I'll probably be ordering the blocks for my videocards and then looking at the conductive pen overvolt. Lil_Jimmy_Norton had a very good experience with that.

Well, that's all for now.
~ Jofaba

[Curtis12]

Re: My hardware woes: So you don't feel so bad about yours

well at least you no stuff about computers, i no nothing, exept ram which is easier than screwing in a lightbulb