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[Angry Grimace]

Now here's a question:

How strong of a PSU do I need to run a Q6600 OC'd to 3.0 and a GTX 260 216?

 

[madmook]

500 watts and up should do fine.

 

[Angry Grimace]

500 watts and up should do fine.

I was just going to say fuck it and go with a Sonata III, but my friend was saying the 500w that comes with it wouldn't power it with that. And one HDD. I don't need much more fancy parts other than the 260. I'm probably going to just do all that separate anyways though. I reall hate clutter and wanna go with modular anyways.

 

[ghst]

I was just going to say fuck it and go with a Sonata III, but my friend was saying the 500w that comes with it wouldn't power it with that. And one HDD. I don't need much more fancy parts other than the 260. I'm probably going to just do all that separate anyways though. I reall hate clutter and wanna go with modular anyways.

500w should be fine, but i'd bump it up to 550/600 to be on the safe side.

 

[otake]

new phenoms coming. supposedly easily overclockable to 4Ghz.

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/15927

 

[Shinz Kicker]

i was going to get a antec earthwatts 500 psu with my antec case thats going to be running a q6660 but i bumped it up to 650 for another 15 dollars just to make sure i would have enough.

 

[TheGreatDave]

8800s aren't future proof at all. GPU cards in general aren't future proof :lol But SLI will NOT work on a mobo that doesn't either a) have an nVidia chipset, or b) is an X58 i7 rig (nVidia looks to be getting out of the Intel chipset biz). The 8800 is starting to show it's age, but will still run most current stuff okay. You might look into a GTX 260/216 core at this point if you want something that will last a bit longer.

ATI has a corner on value --> dollar, but driver support kind of sucks from what I hear. Not being a fan of sitting around tweaking random settings, I would go with nVidia, and having been already on nvidia, it's a lot easier to upgrade to a new nvidia driver-wise than Nvidia to ATI.

I know "future proof" is kind of an oxymoron, I mean more that it should last for a year or so before needing to be replaced. When I got my 8600 I felt like I needed to update straight away, and it was less than a year old (I think).

ghst, thanks for the link. I think I may buy it. If it blows up for some reason I'm coming for you

 

[godhandiscen]

new phenoms coming. supposedly easily overclockable to 4Ghz.

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/15927

Yeah, but you also need the mobo with the special SB chip AMD SB750 (I don't know If I'll pick it up yet). This mobo has this chip.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131339

I have the same mobo with a SB600 chip and it doesnt OC that well. However, the SB750 is allowing people to reach 3.5GHz on watercooled PhenomI's.

According to AMD's own expectations it shouldn't be as easy to OC the Phenom II past 4GHz, as it requires watercooling, but apparently they pulled it on air this time. I am picking the Phenom II 240, but I don't know yet if I will get the 750 chip.

Also, it made me laugh that "Crysis" was used to test stability. It's just funny how much of a "benchmark" reputation this game has.

 

[brain_stew]

I was just going to say fuck it and go with a Sonata III, but my friend was saying the 500w that comes with it wouldn't power it with that. And one HDD. I don't need much more fancy parts other than the 260. I'm probably going to just do all that separate anyways though. I reall hate clutter and wanna go with modular anyways.

If its the Earthwatts PSU that comes with it you'll be fine. Your PC won't ever draw more than 350w - 400w at load from the wall.

 

[Angry Grimace]

If its the Earthwatts PSU that comes with it you'll be fine. Your PC won't ever draw more than 350w - 400w at load from the wall.

To be honest I'm torn as to what I'll do right now.

I wanna go Quad-Core for my new build but I have no clue what prices are going to be like in January when I do the build.

I think a Q9550 is out becuase at the moment it's price is more than the i7's is. But perhaps it's ready for a shift?

 

[evil solrac v3.0]

I would jump for an i7 right now. no cons and plenty of pros going for it.

 

[Angry Grimace]

I would jump for an i7 right now. no cons and plenty of pros going for it.

No cons?

Other than the price of triple channel DDR3 you mean.

And 2x the motherboard cost.

 

[LordK]

Hrrmmm.. I got my q6600 set up and I think I have a shit stick of ram. So I'm running at 2 gigs right now. I was looking at my core temps, and I was getting around 30 on idle at stock. While I was playing DMC4, max would be about 49-52 C on my hottest core. I'm kind afraid to OC it now. Those temps seem kinda high at stock.

 

[SapientWolf]

Hrrmmm.. I got my q6600 set up and I think I have a shit stick of ram. So I'm running at 2 gigs right now. I was looking at my core temps, and I was getting around 30 on idle at stock. While I was playing DMC4, max would be about 49-52 C on my hottest core. I'm kind afraid to OC it now. Those temps seem kinda high at stock.

I think chespace was pushing 70c on his 6600 without any issues so far. But my question is, what game is so CPU limited that you would need to overclock a quad core? DMC4 runs at over 100+ fps on my decrepit 4200+, and even the notoriously CPU limited World in Conflict runs at 60 after I tweaked a few settings. If you're just doing it for epeen then it would almost be a badge of honor to cook your processor.

 

[LordK]

I think chespace was pushing 70c on his 6600 without any issues so far. But my question is, what game is so CPU limited that you would need to overclock a quad core? DMC4 runs at over 100+ fps on my decrepit 4200+, and even the notoriously CPU limited World in Conflict runs at 60 after I tweaked a few settings. If you're just doing it for epeen then it would almost be a badge of honor to cook your processor.

Yup, I agree with you. I'm not gonna OC it right now because I don't have to. But in the future, I will most likely need to. So I was just stating my concern that it looks like it'll run too hot.

Also, for chespace. I have a 260 core 216 OC and I'm pretty much getting tru at 60 fps. I only get frame drops when I rotate the camera such that a bunch of new geometry floods the screen. But after that, it looks pretty solid at 60 fps.

 

[bee]

I think chespace was pushing 70c on his 6600 without any issues so far. But my question is, what game is so CPU limited that you would need to overclock a quad core? DMC4 runs at over 100+ fps on my decrepit 4200+, and even the notoriously CPU limited World in Conflict runs at 60 after I tweaked a few settings. If you're just doing it for epeen then it would almost be a badge of honor to cook your processor.

che has got a q9550? quad core means shit in 95% of games, if you haven't got it clocked at 3.2ghz or above its a bottleneck, simple as. thats if you've got a gtx260/280 or 4870 or maybe even lower

 

[chespace]

Yeah, I have a Q9550 overclocked to 3.8GHz @ 1.29 vcore.

It's stable in prime95 (10 hours) with peak temps during the torture test at 72C.

For normal gameplay and daily use, I never exceed 56C.

It's really the only way to unbottleneck the 4870x2.

 

[Mr.City]

Damn, my game are still crashing. The most frequent game that seems to crash is Company of Heroes. I did a mem test and there's no errors. Does anyone have any other tips?

By the way, it's giving me this in the error report.

C:\USERS\CORY\DOCUME~1\MYGAME~1\COMPAN~1\WARNINGS.LOG
C:\USERS\CORY\DOCUME~1\MYGAME~1\COMPAN~1\CONFIGURATION.LUA
C:\USERS\CORY\DOCUME~1\MYGAME~1\COMPAN~1\11-23-2008_22_28_58_ERRORLOG.TXT
C:\USERS\CORY\DOCUME~1\MYGAME~1\COMPAN~1\11-23-2008_22_28_58_MINIDUMP.DMP

 

[IronicallyTwisted]

I think chespace was pushing 70c on his 6600 without any issues so far. But my question is, what game is so CPU limited that you would need to overclock a quad core? DMC4 runs at over 100+ fps on my decrepit 4200+, and even the notoriously CPU limited World in Conflict runs at 60 after I tweaked a few settings. If you're just doing it for epeen then it would almost be a badge of honor to cook your processor.

My Q6600 on air runs at 3.33 and peaks at 55 degrees under stress testing, high 30's in idle. 70 degrees is the threshold for the chip but you'll never need to go that high unless you are trying to overclock on stock cooling (which is breaking the first commandment of overclocking, really).

 

[Nemo]

Someone please help me out here. What's the best way or program to check out if a Maxtor HDD is on it's way out? It's about five years old, keeps telling me SMART command failed and crashes when loading at the XP screen. I know it's probably dead, but I need to know what's wrong.

 

[Shinz Kicker]

i was going to ask what games actually used more than 2 cores or multi cores. so instead i googled it and here is what i came up with.

ATI 3D drivers
Nvidia 3D drivers

Age of Empires 3
Battlefield 2
Battlefield 2: Special Forces
Bionicle
Black & White 2
Call of Duty 2 (v 1.01)
City of Heroes
City of Villains
Colin McRae Rally 4
Command And Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
Doom 3
FEAR
Galactic Civilizations
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
Gothic 3
GTR 2
Guild Wars
Jedi Knight II (Mac version confirmed)
King Kong
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (Mac version confirmed)
Need for Speed: Carbon
Oblivion
Perimeter
Quake 3 Arena
Quake 4
RoboBlitz
Serious Sam 2
Star Trek: Voyager Elite Force (Mac version confirmed)
Team Fortress 2
The Movies
Tony Hawk's American Wasteland
World of Warcraft (Burning Crusade)

Games that take advantage of Quad Core:

Alan Wake
Bioshock
Company of Heroes
Crysis
Far Cry 2
Half-life 2: Episode 2
Hellgate: London
Lost Planet
Microsft Flight Sim X
Portal
Rainbow Six Vegas
Source Engine
Splinter Cell Double Agent
STALKER
Stranglehold
Supreme Commander
Unreal Engine 3
Unreal Tournament 3

Games that are supposedly multi-threaded:
(Still confirming. Once I get a link then I'll move the game up or off the list)

Falcon 4
IL-2 Sturmovik
Medal of Honor: Airborne
Prey
Rainbow Six 3: Athena Sword
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Starsiege
Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway
Civilization 4
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
Fury
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2
The Witcher
Tabula Rasa
Warhammer MMORPG
World in Conflict

 

[Hajaz]

have you lapped your cpu che?

 

[otake]

I posted this in the crysis thread but I want you guys thoughts on this as well:

I run warhead with everything on gamer at 1680x1050 with 2xAA. I get average 30fps except on the ice parts with large environments. If I lower everything to mainstream my fps goes up to 40 in those same ice levels. Would I be correct in concluding that my bottleneck is my gpu?

I have a radeon 4870 with 512MB overclocked. What if I add a second 4870 and do crossfire, wouldn't that improve the situation?

 

[Shinz Kicker]

im still building my parts list i posted earlier, should i go for a 4870 512 with 4 gigs of ram or a 4850 512 with 8 gigs of ram.

 

[Shogmaster]

im still building my parts list i posted earlier, should i go for a 4870 512 with 4 gigs of ram or a 4850 512 with 8 gigs of ram.

If your primary goal is gaming, you don't need more than 4GB of RAM.

 

[ghst]

I posted this in the crysis thread but I want you guys thoughts on this as well:

I run warhead with everything on gamer at 1680x1050 with 2xAA. I get average 30fps except on the ice parts with large environments. If I lower everything to mainstream my fps goes up to 40 in those same ice levels. Would I be correct in concluding that my bottleneck is my gpu?

I have a radeon 4870 with 512MB overclocked. What if I add a second 4870 and do crossfire, wouldn't that improve the situation?

what are all your specs, and are you running a custom config?

im still building my parts list i posted earlier, should i go for a 4870 512 with 4 gigs of ram or a 4850 512 with 8 gigs of ram.

8gigs? games are only just starting to peak over 2.

4870, no question whatsoever. if anyone tells you differently, punch them square in the teeth.

 

[zoku88]

I don't think Civilization IV can take advantage of multiple cores. I've never seen it use more than one, anyway (AFAIK.)

I don't think some of those games on the list do, they're waaay to old. (Quake 3? Are you really sure about that?)

 

[bee]

I don't think some of those games on the list do, they're waaay to old. (Quake 3? Are you really sure about that?)

r_smp 1

 

[Sciz]

So, I got all of my parts yesterday, and spent the evening assembling the system. I finish, turn on the power supply, hit the switch, nothing happens. Fast forward through a fair bit of troubleshooting, and I find that the difference between whether I can or can't power on the motherboard depends on whether or not I have the screws in tightly or not. I suppose this means it's shorting out against the case, but what exactly would I need to change or replace?

 

[ghst]

So, I got all of my parts yesterday, and spent the evening assembling the system. I finish, turn on the power supply, hit the switch, nothing happens. Fast forward through a fair bit of troubleshooting, and I find that the difference between whether I can or can't power on the motherboard depends on whether or not I have the screws in tightly or not. I suppose this means it's shorting out against the case, but what exactly would I need to change or replace?

clarify this a lil, did you actually get it to turn on by loosening the screws or are you just going by what you've read?

 

[otake]

what are all your specs, and are you running a custom config?



8gigs? games are only just starting to peak over 2.

4870, no question whatsoever. if anyone tells you differently, punch them square in the teeth.

No custom config. Core 2 Duo overclocked at 2.8 Ghz. 4 gigs of ram, and the mentioned radeon 4870.

 

[Sciz]

clarify this a lil, did you actually get it to turn on by loosening the screws or are you just going by what you've read?

I screwed it all the way in, attached nothing but the power supply and power button, nothing happened. I loosened all of the screws, hit the power button, and the power supply comes on and the board's LEDs light up. Having it completely out of the case works fine as well.

 

[Cheeto]

I screwed it all the way in, attached nothing but the power supply and power button, nothing happened. I loosened all of the screws, hit the power button, and the power supply comes on and the board's LEDs light up. Having it completely out of the case works fine as well.

Double check the mounts and make sure that they all line up correctly. Next step is to lay the motherboard on a static bag in the case then screw through that.

 

[Sciz]

Double check the mounts and make sure that they all line up correctly. Next step is to lay the motherboard on a static bag in the case then screw through that.

The holes all line up pretty well. Off by less than a millimeter here and there, but I can get all nine screws through without any trouble. I've still got all of the packaging it shipped in, so I guess I'll go see about poking holes in its bag.

 

[LordK]

i was going to ask what games actually used more than 2 cores or multi cores. so instead i googled it and here is what i came up with.

Devil May Cry 4 utilizes quad cores as well. Since LP and DMC4 do, I suspect RE5 (pretty sure it's gonna come to the PC) and SF4 will too which are the two games I'm seriously looking forward to next year.

 

[marsomega]

Go for the 4870 w/ 1gb instead. Much better experience over all for a very extra cost.

 

[ghst]

No custom config. Core 2 Duo overclocked at 2.8 Ghz. 4 gigs of ram, and the mentioned radeon 4870.

try this,

http://files.filefront.com/UltimaRages+CCC+Tweaks+fodzip/;12058664;/fileinfo.html

just extract the autoexec from the level 4 folder into your crysis root folder.

 

[SapientWolf]

i was going to ask what games actually used more than 2 cores or multi cores. so instead i googled it and here is what i came up with.

ATI 3D drivers
Nvidia 3D drivers

Age of Empires 3
Battlefield 2
Battlefield 2: Special Forces
Bionicle
Black & White 2
Call of Duty 2 (v 1.01)
City of Heroes
City of Villains
Colin McRae Rally 4
Command And Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
Doom 3
FEAR
Galactic Civilizations
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
Gothic 3
GTR 2
Guild Wars
Jedi Knight II (Mac version confirmed)
King Kong
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (Mac version confirmed)
Need for Speed: Carbon
Oblivion
Perimeter
Quake 3 Arena
Quake 4
RoboBlitz
Serious Sam 2
Star Trek: Voyager Elite Force (Mac version confirmed)
Team Fortress 2
The Movies
Tony Hawk's American Wasteland
World of Warcraft (Burning Crusade)

Games that take advantage of Quad Core:

Alan Wake
Bioshock
Company of Heroes
Crysis
Far Cry 2
Half-life 2: Episode 2
Hellgate: London
Lost Planet
Microsft Flight Sim X
Portal
Rainbow Six Vegas
Source Engine
Splinter Cell Double Agent
STALKER
Stranglehold
Supreme Commander
Unreal Engine 3
Unreal Tournament 3

Games that are supposedly multi-threaded:
(Still confirming. Once I get a link then I'll move the game up or off the list)

Falcon 4
IL-2 Sturmovik
Medal of Honor: Airborne
Prey
Rainbow Six 3: Athena Sword
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Starsiege
Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway
Civilization 4
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars
Fury
Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2
The Witcher
Tabula Rasa
Warhammer MMORPG
World in Conflict

A lot of those games in the top list aren't really multithreaded, and some actually have issues with dual core. It's bizarre seeing BF2 there for dual core support since it has so many known problems with those processors. I've bolded the games that I know are multithreaded. It's worth mentioning that the only game where I really see the quads consistently smoke the duals is SupCom.

 

[Sciz]

The holes all line up pretty well. Off by less than a millimeter here and there, but I can get all nine screws through without any trouble. I've still got all of the packaging it shipped in, so I guess I'll go see about poking holes in its bag.

haha, power! Now to just connect all of the cables and watch it fail to POST. :lol

 

[Cheeto]

haha, power! Now to just connect all of the cables and watch it fail to POST. :lol

lol, check memory

 

[Sciz]

Good news: The system POSTs.
Bad news: It powers off within 3-20 seconds.

I'm not too surprised, after all the dicking around I ended up doing with the CPU and its heatsink without any extra paste on hand. At least I hope that's the only problem.

 

[Cheeto]

Good news: The system POSTs.
Bad news: It powers off within 3-20 seconds.

I'm not too surprised, after all the dicking around I ended up doing with the CPU and its heatsink without any extra paste on hand. At least I hope that's the only problem.

You have the CPU fan connected right?

 

[Sciz]

Yep, it and every other fan in the system works just fine. Tried tripping the power with a screwdriver and it still shuts down, so it isn't the switch either.

 

[LordK]

I was having the same problem with my system yesterday... one of my sticks of ram is bad. Made my mobo go crazy.

 

[Danj]

games are only just starting to peak over 2.

Won't games have to go 64-bit only if they want to use more than 2 gigs of memory? Pretty sure current 32-bit applications are limited to 2 gig virtual address spaces.

 

[Cheeto]

Yep, it and every other fan in the system works just fine. Tried tripping the power with a screwdriver and it still shuts down, so it isn't the switch either.

Ya try shuffling the ram or trying it with only one stick.

 

[Sciz]

Ya try shuffling the ram or trying it with only one stick.

Tried that, not the issue. What is likely to be the issue is that I finally got into the BIOS long enough to check the temperature, and the CPU was at 111C and climbing (at which point it promptly shut down again, and this time I decided to leave it be). Hence why I'm just now back home with a fresh tube of paste.

 

[Hazaro]

Tried that, not the issue. What is likely to be the issue is that I finally got into the BIOS long enough to check the temperature, and the CPU was at 111C and climbing (at which point it promptly shut down again, and this time I decided to leave it be). Hence why I'm just now back home with a fresh tube of paste.

Well there's your problem.

Make sure it's getting contact, etc. Use more paste than necessary if you need to get a connection, the temps won't suffer that much.

 

[Shinz Kicker]

well my max gaming resolutions are 1280 x 1024 on my monitor and 720p on my tv. so a 4850 should be more than enough for me. and most benchmarks only put the 4870 like 5-10fps better than the 4850 and those resolutions are far higher than what i have currently and for probably another year.

when i do an upgrade the single cards the 4870 will go obsolete just as fast as the 4850. im just trying to make the rest of my rig which will be q666 oc to 3.0+ 4 gigs ram so when stuff does go multi core i could use them and get a new gpu in future. my current rig is x800xt 256 P4 3.4 2.5 gigs of ram so this new one is BIG upgrade and my current computer is still best one of my friends.

Even when i do upgrade to a 1080p tv which i will probably game on the 4850 should be more than enough for now.

 

[Sciz]

I've come to the conclusion that the stock Intel cooler's mounting pins are shit. The first two go in ok, the third one takes a fair amount of effort, and the fourth requires you to have the strength of Hercules and subsequently a motherboard forged by Hephaestus to avoid cracking the thing in two. Fortunately I meet both of these requirements, and the system booted up to a nice cool 30C. Now I just need to make sure the processor wasn't damaged in my prior testing, and figure out why the POST is reporting an E8400 at 2.83 Ghz.