S.T.A.L.K.E.R.mod

by **Kanyhalos** on 27 Sep 2008 01:02

Neverending story

by **Kanyhalos** on 27 Sep 2008 02:09

I have got a Sapphire Radeon x1950Pro 512mb video card.
Now I'm offensing the nVidia owners!

Lol, I'M just kidding, it's 3:00am here and I should sleep, lmao

by **barin** on 27 Sep 2008 08:36

It seems that nvidia is more popular in game development but since i own ati ...

by **Kanyhalos** on 27 Sep 2008 10:44

Yes, I think so, too. The only reason why I bought ATI is that, my godfather is owner of a huge pc company and actually that was in a very friendly price.
Very good card btw, I could play Crysis on maximum settings with some minor modding without loosing FPS.

by **audioave10** on 27 Sep 2008 18:25

Nowadays, both cards are quite good. It's more a decision based on what
kind of games you play and the Driver support. For some reason, both
cards also need an extra program like Rivatuner to speed-up the cooling
fan on these cards. Poor software sometimes. Prices are competitive too.

by **nandersen** on 02 Oct 2008 11:26

Until recently I used a Sapphire Radeon x1950Pro 512 MB - this card could run S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in Static Lighting but in FDL it barely exceeded 20 fps.

I upgraded to a nVidia GeForce 9800 GTX and now I can run it on max settings in FDL and only occasinally get less than 40 fps.

The x1950Pro had no automatic fan control that I know of - I used ATT to regulate fan speed depending on temperature. Now I have a similar problem with my nVidia card... the built-in fan control never spins the fan faster than 50%. I'm surprised that the VGA manufacturers forget about such important feature.

by **Kanyhalos** on 02 Oct 2008 13:40

Well, I can't say a single bad word to my x1950pro.

by **nandersen** on 02 Oct 2008 17:28

What's your screen resolution, Kanyhalos?

by **Kanyhalos** on 02 Oct 2008 18:42

1280x1024

My monitor doesn't allow to use greater then 1600x1200 but that would make the fonts too small, my eyes would be burned out, lol.

by **potamac77** on 20 Oct 2008 19:18

New tests show, yesterday I checked, ATI is a better choice overal than Nvidia now, at least for 260GTX and 4870 comparison.

ANANDTECH-The Review Site wrote:Our recommendation here is to first see if either card happens to run a game you care about better than the other, but if not then just buy whatever is cheaper. Today that would be the Radeon HD 4870, currently it's very tough to find stock-clocked Core 216s and those are priced above $300; even if we could find availability at $279, the 4870 is still cheaper. Until the price comes down, the Radeon HD 4870 still remains our pick at the $250 - $300 pricepoint. While NVIDIA has closed the performance gap, the part they used still maintains a price gap.

links to the full review:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3408&p=1

by **Draakon** on 26 Oct 2008 20:04

Ati here. As NVIDIA cards crash more.

by **silverpower** on 27 Oct 2008 00:28

ATi user here, but I'm undecided on what card to get next - GTX260 or HD4870/4870x2. I'm leaning towards the former, because having lots of VRAM is <3. Especially if you're planning on running a board with only four working PCIe lanes. I'm trying to put together something thin and light, with a 90-degree riser, and the only decent mini-ITX v1-spec boards I can find are either super-expensive or have some tradeoffs. The J&W board in particular only has four usable lanes on the sole x16 slot. Not all that big a deal unless you skimp on VRAM on your GPU, then the loss of bandwidth starts to hurt.

by **Nightwatch** on 27 Oct 2008 01:16

I have been wavering between ATI and Nvidia recently after the necessity of getting a new (and reasonably powerful) graphics card showed itself. I have checked the potamac77's link to ANANDTECH review/comparison of 260GTX vs. ATI 4870 and, for some time at least, I leaned toward the 4870; then again, I think i would go for Nvidia. One of the reasons is the amount of RAM (more) the 260GTX offers as you also point to and the others are driver issue (currently ATI drivers are somewhat better than Nvidia's, but in general Nvidia mostly brings out better drivers) and the built quality. It has always been debatable, but I find that Nvidia produces some better built and more stable products, as I have witnessed more complaints from ATI users in comparison to users of Nvidia cards. I ghave to say on this point that I do not own any shares of Nvidia (I wish I had

) so, my view is purely from an independent point.

[It's also interesting to see that you've chosen the (relatively very new)mini-ITX v1-spec standard mobo. Although it's possible to find reviews on the internet on this new standard, (http://www.linuxdevices.com/links/LK6805240727.html ,
http://www.mini-itx.com/ ) it'd valuable to know what the reasons were that made this mini-ITX v1-spec standard more advantageous over ATX specs boards on your decision. ]

maybe you wish to elaborate on the main points that led you to decide on choosing this and if you've seen any advantages points

by **silverpower** on 27 Oct 2008 07:26

It's a v1-spec board, first off - Mini-ITX 2.0 requires the 16x slot to have 16 lanes hooked up to it. But those haven't come out yet.

As for why I'm pairing such a small board with a GTX260, it's space savings. I'm planning on building a custom enclosure for it, and I'd prefer it to be relatively flat. With a 90-degree riser, this isn't hard to do, especially if I strip off the card enclosure and go watercooled.

Some caveats are that I can't get very aggressive with overclocking without installing some serious PWM cooling - the J&W Minix board simply can't handle 125-140W TDP procs without it, and that includes overclocked processors specced lower at stock clocks. It also uses SODIMMs, which are harder to find in performance variants. On the other hand, it has a pretty decent onboard GPU, complete with dedicated memory.

Now, there's an MSI unit that's supposedly able to handle Core 2 Quads just fine, and has a proper 16x slot. The J&W is cheaper, though.

by **Nightwatch** on 27 Oct 2008 17:08

Thank you, seems interesting steps in motherboard developments. It'll definitely make my options open for it. Water cooling is a great idea of course on a such small board. Good luck with the project, and I'd like to see how you'd evaluate the performance and other issues of it after you've started using it.

by **rockingmtranch** on 27 Oct 2008 18:23

I just got a 260 card and power supply. Now, my old Mach Speed 939 board and DDR is a bit out of date. I found a board/cpu combo on TigerDirect but with the economy, I couldn't get my finger to click the purchase button LOL. I'll just have to hope Santa thinks I was good this year.

Anyone seen this:
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/featur ... page=0%2C0

http://www.hardcorecomputer.com/Product ... etail.aspx

by **EggChen** on 27 Oct 2008 19:08

I just got one of these beauties.... it got 30fps in Clear Sky!!!! 230fps in Crysis...

Seriously though, this is awesome, I read an article on oil cooling a few months back, but that was a far more amateur set up. Normal components dumped in a plastic tub full of oil, but it still performed brilliantly. Some time before it is a serious cost effective proposition though, but it may be the "simplest" way to cope with the increased heat of future hardware.

by **Nightwatch** on 27 Oct 2008 20:27

Prices running quite high here in the UK at the moment, pound losing serious ground against dollar and euro; and this suddenly makes you realise that almost everything comes from abroad. I'm hoping Santa after the boxing day sales will kick a few prices down for everybody.

And... oil filled computer??? It looked like a April 1 joke, but we're far away from April... Great catch rockingmtranch, this is one hell of a new development. But I'll remain somewhat sceptical though, at least at this stage. It may be effective in absorving and removing the heat, but theer remains a lot of practical problems. How will you change the components, what idf the oli leaks into CPU or other mobo pieces?

What if it leaks into the Graphics Card, then will we start seeing visuals of oil blotches relaxingly moving on our screens??

Heh he.

Seriously, it of course needs to be seen in practice and may prove very practical and efficient, too. (Also there are other PCs like liquid nitrogen cooling ones, too.)

One last note: If they want to send me one, I want mine in olive oil.

by **EggChen** on 27 Oct 2008 20:36

It is all over the Graphics card and CPU... usually the CPU has a heatsink and nothing else.... non-conductive, non-corrosive oil is used so the only parts to worry about are those with moving parts.. hard drives and optical drives.

Though I noticed that rig uses some pretty expensive Solid state drives!!

Back on topic - Yep those prices are driving me up the wall... about two months ago I had my shopping list for an upgrade and decided to wait a bit... now its probably about 50% more expensive!! I'm still looking at a 280, for best overall mix of performance, power consumption and temperature output.

Still, I am consoling myself by playing through SHOC one more time!!

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