Be Excellent To Each Other

Download CPU-Z and see if the CPU is C0 or D0 stepping. (You'll also want to download Core Temp and the Intel Burn Test. I've zipped them up and attached them to this post.)

D0 is newer and better, C0 runs hotter and tends not to clock as far. (Mine is a C0.)

Knowing the stepping will give you a reasonable idea of what you can aim for.

Is your water cooling any good? (i.e. Is it one of those cheap all-in-one solutions with a tiny radiator and single fan or a proper system? You'll still be able to overclock well with a modest all-in-one but won't be aiming as high.)

BEFORE you change anything, fire up Core Temp and then run the Intel Burn Test (literally just run the executable and press 'Start', it doesn't need any tweaking). It only takes three minutes or so and it will absolutely hammer your CPU (all four cores) in a way that no real-world game or app ever will. Keep an eye on Core Temp and note how hot the hottest core gets. This gives you a baseline to start from. (One core always runs hotter than the others.)

I'll need to do a restart of my PC to get a snap of the BIOS screens, but that gives you something to be getting on with

Most i7-920s have 1GHz or more of headroom in them, especially on water, so it's criminal not to overclock them.

Your BIOS may well look different of course (what brand is the mobo?) - these pics are from an ASUS P6T Deluxe.

There aren't many things you'll need to change. You can't increase the CPU multiplier on the 920 (only the Extreme Editions have an unlocked multiplier), so you'll have to increase the 'Base Clock' frequency (shown in my BIOS as 'BCLK').

As you increase the base clock frequency, you increase the speed of the CPU (CPU speed = BASE CLOCK x CPU multiplier).

At stock speed the 920 has a base clock of 133 and a multiplier of 20, that gives you 2667 i.e. 2667MHz which is 2.67GHz.

As we can't increase the multiplier, we increase the base clock instead, mine is at 176.

176 x 20 = 3520 which as you can see in the CPU-Z screeny is what my 920 is running at, 3.52GHz.

However, as you increase the base clock, you also increase the memory frequency, so you'll most likely have to manually alter the speed the RAM is running at to keep it in spec. My RAM is rated at 1600MHz so I've picked the closest divider I can that's under 1600MHz (you can't key an exact value in as it's based on dividers). This means my RAM is actually running a bit slower than it's capable of, but the next divider up would have pushed it over 1600MHz.

Also, double check that the PCIE frequency is locked at 100MHz.

The other stuff in there, you should be able to leave on AUTO.

Have a look around for any sort of 'CLOCK SPECTRUM' options, and turn them off.

Finally, double check your RAM has been identified correctly and is running at the correct timings. In my case, the mobo has configured it perfectly so I can leave everything at auto.

You may have to yank a stick of RAM out to take a look to verify what the settings should be, it's the first four numbers that you're really interested in. (As you can see, my RAM is 9-9-9-24 and the BIOS has it spot on.) You should just check it's got the voltage right whilst you're in there too.

It probably sounds a bit more complicated than it actually is.

To start with go for a modest overclock, maybe increase the base clock to 150 (3GHz), save the settings in the BIOS, boot into Windows, run the Burn Test, check your temps, and rinse wash repeat. Always check you're keeping your RAM in spec every time you increase the base clock.

Ideally you won't see any of the cores going over 80C on the burn test, although the thermal throttling on the 920 isn't until 100C, no one wants their CPU getting that hot.

Obviously if the burn test fails, the overclock is not stable, and you'll have to ramp things back a bit.

All CPUs hit a 'plateau' when overclocking, where you just end up creating lots of extra heat for not much extra speed, in my case it was somewhere between 3.5 and 3.6GHz, so I dropped back to 3.5GHz and left it there.

It's really not that hard to overclock, and TBH modern CPUs/mobos are clever enough to turn themselves off before they fry, unless you go REALLY nuts.

Have fun and report back how you get on!

Well I've got a project for tomorrow now. Thanks a lot.

It's hard to explain how much better GTAIV is on the PC (assuming you have the specs to run it maxed out or at least comfortably better than the console versions).

It's still the same game, same music, same missions, same voices, same everything - but the entire game world is just so much smoother, crisper, better defined, more enjoyable, a nicer place to be.

That horrible fucking 'vaseline' smear has gone, the game world doesn't disintegrate into a pixelly blur in the mid-distance, the loading times are non-existent (my PC seems to basically hold the entire game in RAM, only needing to load each chunk once), the framerate doesn't drop through the floor when it all kicks off, there's no input lag, and you can just switch to keyboard and mouse for the trickier third person on-foot bits rather than clunking about with a gamepad. (I have a wired 360 pad on my PC which is fine for the drivey bits and most of the on-foot bits, but sometimes a keyboard and mouse is a far better option when on foot.)

The game looks and more importantly feels so very much better than the poor struggling 360/PS3 could possibly manage. What Rockstar achieved on those consoles is nothing short of amazing, credit where it's due and all that, but there's no doubt that this game belongs on the PC.

EDIT - Heh

And, in terms of future-proofing, there's a lot of sliders that can be turned wayyyy up. In five years' time, the PC version will be the definitive visual incarnation of Liberty City - playing with a draw-distance set around to 20 and traffic-density way low makes the prospect of those hitting the 100 exciting. But now... well, it probably still is the most attractive version, but it's annoyingly fiddly to get there.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/grand ... uto-iv_1_8

This is why, ultimately, the PC wins.

GTAIV still looks exactly the same on a 'brand new' 360 Slim (which is actually a mid-range six year old PC in reality) as it did when it was released. A modestly specced modern PC can run the game at settings that weren't even feasible when the game was released. (My PC, despite its recent upgrade, is still a CPU/mobo/RAM combo that's two and a half years old)

I think you may have opened a can of worms there.

Undoubtedly true though.

This just about nails it:

http://archive.videogamesdaily.com/feat ... -on-p1.asp

Are there more pedestrians on the big-box version? GTAIV still felt a little bit too quiet to me on the 360. It seemed like there was more going on in GTA3, but that could be my perception, I never did an actual count or owt.

Nah, I don't think anyone really disputes that a PC is capable of producing far more graphically pleasing games than any consoles out there right now. Most console-proponents however (myself included), will take the convenience of the console over the graphics of the PC, is all.

That, and the point that GTA4 was just deathly dull and annoying to play, regardless of how many million gigapixels its alias could voxelate, or whatever. Staggering technical achievement, yeah, but I got bored of it after a day.

JC always said that GTA IV was massively inferior on the PC - I'm more likely to side with him, to be honest.

I finished Fallout New Vegas yesterday and while I was playing it there where a few times when I thought back to JC talking about draw distances in Fallout 3. Before I heard them mentioned on here I had no idea what they were but in New Vegas I could really see the appeal in having the option to play it on PC. It's a single player game, so no need for my Xbox live friends list and the graphics in New Vegas seemed to be pushing it, although maybe they weren't and it was just another symptom of it being the buggiest game I've ever played.

Oh, has it not been patched yet? Plan on picking it up at some point but don't fancy it if it's still broken.

Still very much broken.

It is much more annoying this time round than it was when I was first playing it, when it was first released I forgave it of a lot of things but now it's just beyond irritating. The bugginess really, really detracts from the game play after a while. It froze completely numerous times, usually when loading while walking through doors, which would throw me right back out to my last saved game and, invariably, that'd be about 20mins previous. There are loads of other things wrong with it but it depresses me just thinking about it because I would like to complete it at some point, as opposed to launching it and the xbox through the tv.

It has been patched I think, just not enough! I didn't start playing it til a few weeks ago and it seemed fine but then it froze on a loading screen as I went through a door. Multiple restarts later and it still wasn't working and my next save was about an hour earlier. I ended up deleting the latest patch which allowed it to load, then letting it repatch the next time I started. Then I got a few more freezes as I went through doors (leading to habitually saving before entering a new area) and in some cases it even froze mid combat or as you were walking around. When that happened you had no choice but to restart the game. It was also very juddery and suffered a lot of screen tear(i think that's the right phrase?) and as I mentioned, the draw distances were very poor. I feel like they were better in Fallout 3 but that might just be a trick of the memory.
I would still highly recommend it, it really is a great game and I enjoyed it loads but considering the ease of Xbox gaming and how much it all seems to work, it really was quite shocking to play a game that suffered so badly at times. Have they released DLC yet? i read somewhere that they aimed to have patched all the problems before DLC came out but I don't know if that target had been and gone.

It's certainly had a number of patches, on all platforms.

These are, indeed, symptoms of a game engine under stress.

I've not played F:NV in ages. I was debating moving my gaming PC down to my TV because that way I might play it more, but it won't really fit in the living room.

I don't think I'd really have minded or even particularly noticed screen tear or judderyness(?!) or anything like that without the bugs. It was only because whenever any form of graphical glitch occurred you were immediately praying that it didn't freeze that they became so obvious and jarring.
If I had a good gaming PC, or the money for one, then I would be happy to play single player games on PC rather than Xbox. My PC is in the living room anyway since we have the second Xbox sharing its monitor.

LONG TIME NO THREADREAD,





I never claimed the 32bit app could use more than 32 bits of address space! I even said the range was 2^32. Anyway, there are 32b Linux distros that run on 32bit CPUs that deal with 64 GB of RAM. Like I said, it just requires OS and hw support it and your app will never know, via the magic of virutal memory. You even mentioned PAE, which is exactly how it does it on an x86! I don't know why Windows didn't use PAE. Maybe they couldn't be bothered? Either way; We're agreeing on this?

Boo! FIGHT!

Various server versions of Windows do support PAE. I've used it on production SQL servers. Support for it probably didn't trickle down into desktop OSs because it's a hideous hack with horrible performance-crippling side-effects.

Yes, I now see, because I misread
as implying that an individual app could address more than 4 GB of memory at once. I'm guessing you meant "a 32 bit app can use any 4 GB of space it wants, whether it's the first four or the chunk from 16-20 GB or whatever". Yes?

Reading back through the thread, I'm think I'm not the only one who misunderstood that.

You are, of course, correct; if you have 8 GB of RAM and two memory-hungry apps running at once then they can have 4 GB each. However, it's not often you do have two memory-hungry apps running at once; generally, if it was that resource intensive (e.g. a game or a mammoth Photoshop file or something), it'd be the only thing under active use on the machine in the first place. And each app is still capped at 4 GB addressable, which means it only gets 2 GB of physical RAM on most Windows installs, which isn't very much. So x64 is still very much the correct answer.

When JC played GTAIV it:

a) Was bugged to buggery
b) The PC to run it properly didn't exist

Both of these have conditions have now changed, hence the PC version is the definitive version IF you have the machine to do it justice.

I'm not sure about pedestrian density, but certainly vehicle density is insane if you have it at 100 (it's estimated that the console versions run at a vehicle density of 33), to the extent that you get proper traffic jams and even gridlock around the scene of a bad accident, and that does make the game feel a lot 'fuller' and more like a proper city.

The explosion chains you can put together are mental.

However, as you can well imagine, actually navigating Liberty City with what is effectively 'real' traffic density is a nightmare, so I've dialled it back to 40 You can change it whenever you want though, so if I ever fancy creating some insane carnage I just whack it back to 100.

I set GTA IV downloading from Steam when I left this morning, so when I do finally get home tonight I'll give it a go. I know the PC version was absolute shite last time I tried it though - but I do have a much more powerful PC nowadays.

I'm still of the opinion that it was a shit game regardless of the technical issues it suffered.

What are your specs now Zio?

Quad-core CPU and at least 1GB of RAM on the graphics card seem to be the main factor. (4GB or more of system RAM is a given these days.)

No way. I believe in the way of JC. The Rapture is coming (sub please check)!

Yeah the GTAs have always been a personal taste sort of deal. I love most of them but never got along with San Andreas and actively disliked The Lost And The Damned DLC for GTAIV because your 'crew' were such a bunch of total cunts.

I think there is overlap between the technical issues and the game itself though. Vice City on the PS2 I gave up with because the game engine had been stressed past breaking point and the controls were so utterly crap (GTA3 had suffered too but not so badly, they pushed it too far with Vice City). I then played Vice City through on the PC (infinitely better framerate and dual-controls using PS2 pad and keyboard + mouse combo) and really enjoyed it.

GTAIV does take itself too seriously in the main story mode IMO, but it's a decent enough narrative and reasonably involving, and there are always a million other things you can do when it disappears up its own arse a bit.

I also think GTAIV is into 'the technical stuff matters' category, the 360 (even more so the PS3) struggle with it dreadfully, to the extent that you're 'taken out' of the game too often by technical constraints, which the PC completely removes.

Wow you never managed to do that when he was actually posting here.

Ahh just noticed the follow up post well that's more the kind of thing I expect from you.

Hey, don't blame me. I wasn't even here when he left. I always used to back him up when he was right (not very often, admittedly).

I wasn't blaming you for him leaving. Sorry if it came across that way.

I've got a Core i5-750 at 2.67GHz (could overclock it, but I've not seen a huge amount of need to so far), 4GB RAM and a GeForce 280 GTX 1GB. I've just had a quick go with GTA IV and I must admit, it is quite impressive since the last time I played. I noticed the frame rate and memory consumption went to shit when I put shadows on Very High, but when I put them on High I could ramp everything else right up and still have it running silky smooth. There's not even that much visible difference between High and Very High shadows, so it's worth scaling that back.

Still not sure if I'll actually bother with the game though, it bored me to tears last time I tried to play. I loved the GTA games prior to IV.

Having put some decent time into GTAIV over the last few days, (OMG it's just so fucking gorgeous when the game world is rendered how it was intended to be), I'd say the secret to consistently enjoying it is to spend time doing the side missions and optional stuff.

The protagonists aren't as utterly hateful as in The Lost And The Damned DLC, but they're still essentially a shower of scummy cunts and it's hard to feel any affinity with them, especially as Nico's 'I need the money' mantra wears progressively thinner. (I think they got it right in GTA3, when your character literally said nothing for the entire game, then you could use the power of IMAGINATION to fill some of the blanks in.)

However, the sideshow stuff (racing, pinching cars, internet jollies, drug delivery, vigilante etc) is both entertaining and a nice 'pure game' diversion from the occasionally annoying main story. (Don't get me wrong, I like the narrative in GTAIV and there's a lot to admire in there, but sometimes I get pissed off with it.)

GTAIV is also a bit old-fashioned hardcore in that there's none of that saving whenever you fancy it bollocks, you fuck up a mission (some of the on-foot ones are pretty punishing, even with a keyboard and mouse), and even if you've just spent 15 minutes getting to the last couple of baddies, if you die, you have to go back and do it all over again. In a way I admire it, but again, in a way, it annoys me, I'm an old bastard now with a family and a responsible job and I can't spend my entire life playing computer games and drinking beer, as much as I might like to.

If I added my CD key of GTA4 to steam, does it still need the 6 bajillion other things (rockstar pass, GFWL login, etc, etc, blah, blah, blah) ?

The Rockstar Pass is 100% optional, it just adds functionality like uploading clips from the built-in video clip editor to Rockstar Social (although it has to be said the video editor is a pretty awesome tool). You can bypass it completely and just click on 'play offline', it makes no difference to the game.

GFWL is required for tracking achievements , friends logons, multiplayer, and stuff like that, since it's all integrated with the LIVE hive mind (I see BEEXers coming online all the time when I'm playing GTAIV on my PC, and I guess most of those BEEXers are on their 360s). However, to just play the single player campaign you can again choose not to log in and you'll be able to play as normal with an offline profile and save your games to that offline profile.

They are the only 'extra' logons required, and TBH, once you've put the details in once, it remembers them for each subsequent play, so it's painless and transparent.

The extra time the couple of extra clicks take at game startup compared to the 360 version is more than compensated for by the vastly quicker load times, and again once you're in the game, it'll just hold as much of it as it can in RAM, so loading times when going back and forth between saves, retrying missions etc is basically non-existent. (If you're running with 4GB of RAM or more, you'll be laughing.)

Do be aware however that you need a decently specced PC to see much of an improvement from the 360 game, especially as PC monitors tend to have higher native resolutions so far more pixels to render. A quad core Intel CPU, 4GB of RAM and a 1GB modern graphics card should be your target. (AMD CPUs having been nothing more than rehashed Athlon64 architecture for years now, hence shit.)

How did it go Lewie? Or did you blow up your PC and burn down the house?.......

I got busy with other stuff. Might do it tomorrow actually though.

Speaking of GTAIV...

Google map of Liberty City

Custom PC has a feature this month that builds a PC capable of gaming at 1920x1080 for just over £400, or just over £500 if you include £110 for the operating system. (If you've got an existing Windows license you won't need that.)

Quad-core processor at 3.6GHz, 4GB of RAM, a 1GB Radeon 5850 graphics card that's one generation behind the curve but still kicks ass, 500GB hard drive, good quality case and PSU - basically a really tidy (and quiet!) system.

That really isn't a lot of money for a machine that will do everything 'computery' as well as play games at a level you'll never have seen before if you're used to the 360/PS3.

The 'PCs are really expensive!' mantra has never been less true than it is these days. (As well as the fact that games are generally cheaper on the PC as well, and you've got the awesome content networks such as Steam and Good Old Games.)

EDIT - Fuck me the camera on the HTC Desire is shit.

Yeah, but you can still get a 360 and a PS3 for just over £400, and not have to screw them together yourself.

Indeed, although that PC has more processing and graphics power than the 360 and PS3 put together. It has cheaper games, and it 'does' everything else as well, internet, telly, movies, email, applications, emulators, music, media player etc.

As for putting it all together, it's really not that difficult to build a PC, and quite satisfying too. (And Custom PC includes a complete guide on how to put that PC together as well).

Does that come with a monitor?

What next man, the moon on a stick?

I guess the presumption is that everyone already has a screen of some description.

Or a game I can play by just listening, I guess. Wait, does it come with speakers?


Ah - can it plug into a TV?
If not, you're going to need a monitor too, so say £100. While I agree with your overall point, a total outlay of £610 to play some games isn't cheap in any sense of the word. Neither is £510, though. Neither is £400, to be fair.

The graphics card has DVI, HDMI and Display Port connectivity, I'd be very surprised if anyone didn't already have something they can plug it into.

Besides which, is £610 really a lot of money? An iPhone4 costs £500.

EDIT - Speakers = £10, although TBH I'd guess most folks already have a set of speakers of some description, or a hi-fi they can plug it into.

Yes.

Of course it is.

What? Yes, it's a shit-load.

Well I suppose it's relative really, innit.

I'm not rich by any stretch of the imagination but I don't think £610 is a lot of money, particularly since that cash will buy you a really capable PC that'll last you for years and do your games as well.

(And remember £610 includes the screen and OS, if you've already got both of them, you're actually looking at just over £400.)

To who?

I accept some people have limited means, students, unemployed, minimum wage workers etc - but on a general level I wouldn't say that £610 is anything like a 'shit-load' of money, certainly to someone earning the average wage or better.

It's nearly five times the cost of a the current Wii and Xbox. Granted it can do a lot of stuff, but for "something to play games on" it can hardly be described as cheap. PC gaming isn't cheap. But that's okay, because it's better.

I would like to live in your world, where £600 on on unnecessary item is nothing.

Do you not have a PC? I would argue that one is entirely necessary for most people.