Be Excellent To Each Other

I've not played it but I doubt both screens can be run on a separate adapter/driver, which is what's required to make it run on the plug in and the on-board at once.

Can we get a JC up in here? Anyone? Bit of JC? Turn the JC on? Come on!

Eventually settled at this.

It's overvolted and heavily overclocked, it's benched the Heaven DX11 test for 24 hours stable with extreme tessalisation on, and been solid in games for hours at a time, so it's entirely 'safe', despite being quite a bit past what nvidia say these cards should be volted to.

Needs a manual profile to keep temperatures in check however, but this does stop the fan getting above 70%. I couldn't get it much past 800 on the core without the overvolt.

Overall a very good result IMO from what is generally perceived to be an excessively hot running card with little headroom above stock speeds, and yet here's mine outpacing a £400 GTX 580 quite comfortably. (Noise levels in games still not much more than my old 4890 used to kick out under load, either.)

One thing though, on my fan profile it's actually quieter at idle than on the default profile, as mine idles at 36% (quieter than my case fans) instead of 45% (audible).

Does windows ready boost actually do anything much?

I've got a spare USB stick laying about doing nothing, and have been tempted to leave it plugged into the Revo under the telly. It's not that the Revo seems slow (I only use it for light browsing, VLC, XBMC and some itunes).

Just wondering, like.

In my experience, it's a boost to slower machines. If you have fast memory, a nice cpu and a love SSD, then you'll see no benefit. If however, you're running Win 7 on an old P4 with a gig of DDR1 and a 40 gig HDD, you might see a speed up. Or rather, you should see a speed up. As ever, there are a million factors involved; The speed of the USB port and underlying hardware, the speed of the USB drive, driver etc.

It's a little Revo 3700 with an Atom CPU (D525 I think), 2gig ram, ION2 graphiczzzzz and a teeny HDD.

Maybe I should just give it a try. As I say though, it's not like it feels particularly slow anyway.

Thanks anyway.

I don't think it'll make much of a difference, but hey, it's worth a go.

May have just ordered myself a new PC.

i7 2.66ghz
16gb ddr3 ram
256gb SSD (will be adding my old 1tb drive for data)
2x radeon 5870

Tis an Alienware with liquid cooling and shit.

Got it for just over £1300. Eep.

SIXTEEN GIGS OF RAM?! What the hell for?

Makes my 4gig look a little silly. You could disable virtual memory on that PC and still have more RAM than mine does!

It's a refurb from Dell outlet, so I didn't pick the specs.

I was mainly after the SSD, processor and graphics, but shopping around that was still a dead good deal. More ram aint a bad thing, even if whoever originally picked out these components was clearly going a bit overboard.

I'd hesitate to recommend more than four gigs to anyone -- that's what my computers have, and I run huge amounts of dev stuff without pause. Even photoshop jockies should find 8 gig ample. I'd go so far as to say you could pull half of it and sell it on eBay without ever noticing any slowdowns, unless you have plans to do heavy DV editing or something.

Might do that actually.

Do you know how it's configured? I was under the impression that RAM on i7 chipsets was installed in triples for best performance (which is why you see 3 GB and 6 GB). Perhaps the state of the art has moved on, though.

6x2gb

6x2=12, guy.

Certainly the stuff I do at work you wouldn't want as little as 4Gb. Also much games programming you would struggle to debug with only 4.

But for more general stuff, totally pointless.

*8x2gb.

Aren't nearly all apps/games limited by the 32-bit address space of 1.5GB, even under a 64-bit OS with zillions of gigs of RAM?

32 bit ones are, yes.

64 bit ones, not so much.

And 32-bit ones are capped at 2 GB, or 3 GB if you add the /3G switch to boot.ini. We used to do that to our x86 SQL Server boxes.

We have users at work that insist they need 4gig for their 32bit xp machines..

Uhh, they're not necesarily wrong...

I'm happy with 4GB so far. I won't be upgrading in any direction other than an SSD in any near future.

Except they probably also insist on having a 1Gb graphics card in there, and then start complaining.

That's my point though, how many apps have a native 64-bit mode?

AFAIK exactly zero games do, and precious few apps outside of the high-end productivity arena.

(I remember Age of Conan constantly thrashing the hard disk in one large outside area when I had 32-bit Win XP on my 4GB PC, so I upgraded to Win 7 64-bit Ultimate, only to find that the process maxed out at 1.5GB of used RAM exactly the same as it had under XP, and thrashed the hard disk constantly, with over 800MB of system RAM sitting unused.)

How many apps outside of the high end productivity arena would make use of more than 2Gb of RAM?

You're right, most games don't - but (virtually) all the dev tools can easily compile for 64bit, and I would suggest that the main reason they don't is to avoid fragmenting the market even further by shipping games in 32 and 64 bit versions and trying to explain to a largely non-caring customer base which one they should buy.

I overlocked and overvolted the nuts out of my graphics card in February, when it was still winter, and thus, really rather chilly.

The ambient temperature in our house has increased considerably since then, and the fan on the poor old 480 is working an awful lot harder to compensate.

IT'S NOISY.

On the plus side I can dry a little rack of washing near the back of my PC quite quickly, it's especially good at turbo-drying a pair of socks.

I may need to ramp the thing down a bit.

I thought that, but was quite surprised to find that quite a few do when I looked. But given that they'll not be designed to use that much memory, the gains will likely not be worth it anyway.

They are with the apps we provide..

With most OEM PCs, it's either 2 GB or 4 GB. With 2 GB, by the time you knock off the OS itself, graphics card memory hole or shared RAM, and other driver, you've only about 1.5 GB left. That's enough to cause slowdowns with no more than a typical office jockey load of a browser, Outlook, Excel, Word and PowerPoint open.

New PC is badass.

I guess as much by the tweet



I doubt you'd notice for a second if you pulled some RAM out and went for 6x2gb.

Far more importantly than gaming - how fast does it download porn?

A 32 bit app could technically use your >3.whateverGB RAM space. You just need to be using a 64bit OS (or a 32bit one that can deal with large amounts of RAM). Virtual Memory, init?

That's not how virtual memory works. It doesn't get around the 32 bit limit.

You can get around it with PAE, but that's a hideous hack reminiscent of the old extended/expanded memory schemes to get around the 640 KB addressable limit of the 8086. It's also very slow.

Of course it does. Your usermode app has a virtual space that is 0-2^32 large. I, the OS, could easily map that into the 16GB-20GB physical range.

How? Your address registers are a 32-bit number. The OS can only handle a total of 4 294 967 296 different addressable locations. You can stick those into the 16-20GB range if you want, but that'll still leave the OS unable to address any memory location outside that range.

You could have an entirely different memory architecture that allowed you to switch between 5 different user memory spaces of somewhat under 4GB each, but that's not how x86 works. If you've got to change it, you might as well just switch to x64 and you're done.

Virtual memory is nothing to do with expanding your available memory addressing. It's about taking pages of memory and putting them on disk so you can use that memory for something else, and swapping those pages in and out of memory when it's needed. The OS can't address anything that's in virtual memory, it has to page it back into 'real' memory first.

This is exactly what happens when you have many 32 bit apps running on a 64 bit OS with lots of RAM, but it still doesn't let any one app get at more than 3 GB at once, or 2 GB if you don't put the switch in boot.ini.

In general, if you've gone to the expense of 16 GB of RAM, it's because you have one big app you want to run (Photoshop, or Final Cut, or SQL Server, say), not lots of medium sized ones.

Snagged myself a bargain from work this week, one of the dudes there was selling off his 'old' stuff (his old stuff being better than anything I'd buy new) and I snapped it up.

Intel Core i7-920 CPU
Asus P6T Deluxe mobo
12GB (6x2) of fancy GEIL 1600MHz tri-channel DDR3 RAM

His asking price? £180, thank you very much.

Got it installed last night, (everything else I've kept the same, including going back in the same case), and for a laugh I let Windows boot up from my hard drive, expecting carnage. (Win 7 Ultimate 64.) I was of course fully expecting to have to do a rebuild.

To my amazement it didn't miss a beat, it detected all the new hardware (and it doesn't get bigger in change terms than mobo + CPU + RAM, with most stuff being integrated onto the mobo these days too), installed a shitload of drivers, asked for a reboot, went off to Windows Update for a couple of bits and bobs, and carried on working perfectly - no rebuild required.

Windows Device Manager is entirely happy, it hasn't missed anything, including recognising my Auzentech X-Fi Prelude soundcard (admittedly a Creative chipset), and I haven't had to manually install a single driver.

I am, it has to be said, pretty fucking impressed.

Got the CPU clocked out to 3.5GHz stable (stock is 2.66GHz), it passed the 'Intel Burn Test' at 3.6GHz but one of the cores hit 88C which is a bit toasty for my tastes so I dropped it back down to 3.5GHz where the max temp on one core was 80C.

It's got a new Arctic Cooling Rev 2 cooler on there though, so the thermal compound should cure a bit over the next few days and I'll tighten the HSF down again, so it might go back to 3.6GHz or higher.

For £180, I think this is the most bangs for bucks I've ever had in nearly 20 years of fucking about with PCs (And seeing 8 CPUs in Task Manager (the 920 is hyper-threaded) is quite sexy too, if you like that sort of thing.)

Fucking hell now I'm not CPU-bound any more the 480 has got a lot harder to live with.

When playing any sort of half-demanding 3D game (even the relatively tame Portal 2), the GPU just sits at 99% the whole time and has been hitting 80C+, at which point the fan is somewhat offensive.

I've ramped the overclock and overvolt down, but it may have to go back to stock at this rate.

Either that or I'll get a 580 with the vapour cooler on it.

On the plus side, Bad Company 2 at 1920x1200 with everything maxed out (including 8xAA) at a constant 60FPS is a thing of amazing beauty.

Fuck.

I used to have a friend like that.

Good people to know.

That's an incredible price, your mate has more money than brains! The i7-920 is still one of the best CPUs out there, isn't it?

TBH he has a lot of money and brains, which is probably why he gets paid so much

He's the dude we go to when we get stuck, he's also a really nice guy as well, worked with him for about ten years now. Whenever he's offloading his old PC gear he sends an email around the techies in our office, and I absolutely snatched his hand off this time.

The i7-920 was actually the 'budget' i7 when it was released, but it's architecturally identical to the other two i7 chips that were released at the same time, clock speed was the only difference, and I've got mine running faster than the 'Extreme Edition' i7 that cost nearly $1000 for the CPU alone at launch. (Think it translated to around £700 at the time.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_In ... 2845_nm.29

Yeah the other stuff he sold this time around was as follows:

Lian-Li PC A-70 Black (case)

Intel I5-750
Asus Maximus Formula III P55 (LGA-1156) motherboard
4GB (2x2GB) Corsair 1600Mhz DDR3 ram

(All installed in the above case including a proper water cooling setup for the CPU.)

Plus:

Western Digital 2TB RE4 3.5” HDD
Creative Labs XF-I PCI-e Sound card
Legit Windows 7 64 Ultimate pre-installed

All that lot?...... (Bear in the mind the case alone went for about £200 new.)

£250, lol.

I was torn between the i7 and the i5, in the end I went for the i7 and one of my mates got the i5. I'm still not entirely sure I made the right decision, although the case is absolutely huge, too big for me in all honesty, I doubt it'd fit in my 'PC space' in fact.

GTAIV at the most uberest settings possible, and an average framerate of over 60FPS in the benchmark?

Yes please.

It really is like a whole new game, no input lag either.

The racket from the 480 is properly doing my fucking head in though, and according to my UPS, the PC is now drawing 500W under load

I installed Crysis the other day when it occurred to me I'd never tried it on my i5-750 / GeForce 280 GTX setup and I was amazed when I discovered I cam now whack everything up to Very High and still have a silky smooth game. I'm going to have to give GTA IV another go I reckon. I've always been put off by it being one of very, very few games I own that's better on console than it is on my PC.

The complete GTAIV pack is £24.99 on Steam, which includes the game and the two expansions.

I was a bit cross about paying that as I paid full price for the game on 360 and bought both the expansions too, before realising I hated the characters in the first expansion and had then lost patience with the limitations of the 360 so didn't even try the second expansion.

£25 isn't a rip-off though, by any stretch of the imagination.

Any tips for how to go about overclocking my i7-920 @AtrocityExhibition or anyone else.

It's got water cooling, so I guess it is worth overclocking it.

I've never overclocked anything before.