Buying a new desktop, want some advice...

Yeah, the logitech MX series are pretty good. I have big hands and I love them. I use the Logitech G7 which is a wireless laser mouse, probably more expensive than what you want but it is the same size as most of the the MX series.

"If you knew how good I am you would think I'm modest."

Thanks, I' ll check those out!

ORIGINAL: Nitro

About the RAM - i guess i figured faster was better, ...but if you' re saying there won' t be a noticable increase in performance then i' ll save my money and leave it as it is.

As for overclocking, ...it' s something i' m interested in but don' t really know enough about to be messing with this rig right now. T

What speed is your ram? If it' s 850~1000mhz you can easily get an extra Ghz out of a 6850 if you buy a better HS/F.

And it' s good you didn' t get a Quad, that shit is gay, and this is coming from someone who gets intel chips for free because I work there, so I don' t give a *** about the price, quad core is gay.

I have my 6850 running @ 4.2Ghz on air with a zalman HS/F, you would notice big performance increase. With the stock HS/F You should still be able to OC to 3.6Ghz at least without having to change anything, just raise the clock speed in your bios.

If you ended up buying that piece of shit 667mhz ram you' re fucked and wasted your money, which is why I asked what speed ram you ended buying.

ORIGINAL: emofag

If you ended up buying that piece of shit 667mhz ram you' re ***ed and wasted your money, which is why I asked what speed ram you ended buying.

Nah, i' m not that daft. It' s 800MHz.

Then OC it.

I picked up a Logitech G15 V2 this afternoon...



...

It' s fucking badass!

I' ll be taking my Novo to work as it' s useless for gaming

what' s that thing sticking out of ur mouse? A tail???

"If you knew how good I am you would think I'm modest."

ORIGINAL: locopuyo

what' s that thing sticking out of ur mouse? A tail???

I don' t like the G7 so i bought a G9. It' s not that bad actually. The cord is rope-like and a lot more flexible than anything else i' ve used.

I just bought a new monitor on amazon (using my $200 gift certificate for part of it).
ViewSonic VX2240w
22" widescreen
1680x1050
2 ms response time

I' ll let you know how it is, it is supposed to arrive sometime next week.

"If you knew how good I am you would think I'm modest."

ORIGINAL: emofag

Is that netgear router?

I used to have that same router and I had to return that piece of shit 3 times because they kept dieing.

On the off chance that you' re still lurking in the face of having being chosen as a game winner then failing to respond to my emails and so missing out... i' d like to know about the problems you had with the router.

I ask because it' s become very inconsistent, often needing a reset. It' s starting to get on my nerves.

Don' t worry about it Nitro. Technology and Science hasn' t advanced enough to the point where we can make a router that works. They' re all garbage.

The previous model was ok, but this one is winding me up.

Anyway, i very nearly bought a pair of 9800 GX2' s the other day but decided that because i' m only playing at 1680 x 1050 they wouldn' t be cost effective

A new series of graphics cards are coming next month anyway. So they' d be outdated.

As for routers that work, I' ve been through a ton of them and nearly all consumer routers suck ass. D-Link especially. There is an exception though. I' ve been running a D-Link DGL-4300 for the last year and a bit now and it' s been perfect the whole way through. Even though the DGL series are from D-Link, they' re good because they use a completely different chipset to the cheapo ones. The bad, is that they' re expensive. But it' s more cost effective in the long run. Don' t let the fact that it' s marketed as a ' gamer' router throw you. It' s just hogwash. The reason why it' s good is because it' s reliable and has a much better feature set than the others.

Ok, quick little project for you guys who know more about this shit than i do...

My cousin has £800 (1566 USD) to buy a new PC and won' t accept any additional money off me or my offer to buy him a £2k outright.

Using:

www.scan.co.uk
www.amazon.co.uk
www.dabs.com
www.microdirect.co.uk
www.aria.co.uk

...whats the best config you can come up with?

This is what i got (not sure about compatability)...

512MB EVGA 8800GT Superclocked, PCI-E 2.0, Mem 1900MHz, GDDR3, GPU 650MHz, Stream 112, 2x DL DVI-I = £135.00

Coolermaster RC-1100 Cosmos S (Sport) Black Silent Full Tower Case w/o PSU = £152.15

EVGA 123-YW-E175-A1, NF750i SLI, 775, PCI-E (x16), DDR2 1066/800, SATA II, SATA RAID, ATX = £130.41

2GB (2x1GB) Corsair TwinX DDR2 XMS2 Dominator, PC2-8500 (1066), 240 Pin, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 5 = £52.45

Intel Core 2 Duo, E8400, Wolfdale Core, S775, 3.0 GHz, 1333MHz, 6MB Cache, Retail = £126.30

650W Coolermaster eXtreme PSU (RP-650-PCAP) = £43.70

Samsung SH-S203D/BEBN 20x DVD±R, 12x DVD±DL, DVD +RW x8/-RW x6, SATA, Black, OEM = £17.60

500 GB Maxtor STM3500320AS DiamondMax 22, SATA II, 7200 rpm, 32MB Cache, 8.5 ms, NCQ = £50.50

Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Extreme Audio Sound Card 24Bit 7.1Ch OEM = £26.32

19" Viewsonic VX1940 Black Widescreen LCD, 1680x1050, 1000:1, 3000:1, 300 cd/m, 2ms, D-Sub = £161.32

That works out at £919.28 but meh...

-Right off the bat after quickly looking at things, it seems foolish to spend so much on the case. On a budget, I would never spend more for my case than for my power supply. Maybe the disc drive and HDD, those are the only components that should be cheaper than the case, and sound card depending on your total budget. Coolmaster makes excellent budget cases. You should be able to shave 100 pounds (or whatever you guys call your crazy currency) right there. A good idea would be to put that money in his RAM and get two 2GB sticks giving him 4 gigs. It' s always better to have two 2 gig sticks as opposed to four 1gig sticks. A better idea if he' s a gamer is to put the money towards his videocard.

-Wait until next month when the HD 4800 series comes out, A HD 4870 will smoke a 8800GT. Even a slightly cut down HD 4850 will beat a 8800GT for about the same money.

- If you do go ATI then don' t get an Nvidia mobo, they' re filled with problems and overclock like shit. Get a G35 mobo instead. ASUS and Gigabyte are good choices.

-HDD, get this one instead
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=678208

But won' t NVIDIA just re-take their current lead with the 9900 series?

Yeah, and ATI sucks. I won' t buy any ATI cards after the abomination kown as the 1900.

"If you knew how good I am you would think I'm modest."

But won' t NVIDIA just re-take their current lead with the 9900 series?

Yes and no.

Rumors on the 9900 series are sketchy, but from what I can tell, the move from 8800GTX to 9900GTX isn' t quite as significant as the move from HD3870 to HD 4870. ATI is fixing the perfromance holes with the 3800 series. Meaning that the HD 4870 won' t be too far behind the 9900GTX. But here' s what you have to consider.

-The 9900GTX will be at least 100$ more than the HD 4870
-There doesn' t appear to be a 9900GX2, at least not initially. I don' t see how it would be physically possible either especially if they stay at 65nm.
-Even if it did exist, it wouldn' t matter because SLI scales like shit.


With this in mind. The most powerful graphics solution this summer I' m predicting will be two HD 4870X2 in XCrossfire, the HD 4870X2 will be the best card naturally. Nvidia will likely still have the single GPU performance crown though.

Like this gen Nvidia will win with texel performance. However this time ATI will have a shader advantage. If you want the best and comparing 9900GTX sli against 4870X2 Xcrossfire. You get:

-9900GTX sli (rough estimate based a guestimate on clock speeds)
Total shader flops
1440 Gflops without MUL

Texel performance (TMUs) billions texels per second
144

128 GBps bandwidth
1024GB each GPU

-HD 4870X2 Xcrossfire
Total Shader flops
4032 Gflops

Texel performance
108.8

108 GBps bandwidth
1024GB per GPU


This gen:

-9800GTX
Shaders no MUL
432 Gflops

Texels per second
43.2

HD3870X2
Shaders
992 Gflops

Billion Texels per second
24.8

That' s probably hard to read, but my pont is that you can see how the HD 4870X2 performs favorably compared to the 9900GTX while the the 3870X2 does not do so well against the 9800GTX. In some cases the 9900 series will beat the 4800 series, but overall I think ATI has a really good solution next round.

Yeah, and ATI sucks. I won' t buy any ATI cards after the abomination kown as the 1900.

The 1900 was competing agains Nvidias 7800/7900 series. The 1900 performed admirably. If I remember correctely you had issues with their drivers because they didn' t support an odd resolution you had.

ATI' s drivers are much better these days and support all the ghetto resolutions you could ask for, and much better than Nvidias shit stain attempts. If you have Vista, Nvidia is the second leading cause for crashes. Trust me, I know. ATi has much more stable drivers.

I didnt' have any problems with resolution. ATI' s drivers just blow goats. 3rd pary Omega drivers are much better. The 1900 was a piece of crap. After a year or so it started having heating problems. The drivers were too retarded to increase the fanspeed. ATI' s drivers put overscan on HDTV output..... That' s about the dumbest thing you could do.....ever.....
Nvidia' s drivers kick the crap out of ATI' s. You can even use NVidia scaling and have black bars for resolutions that don' t match. For intsance you can play starcraft (640x480 fixed resolution) on a widescreen monitor and have black bars on the left and right so it isn' t stretched out and distorted.

I' m never buying an ATI card again unless it is leaps and bounds better in price and performance than the competition. And I doubt that will ever happen. Crappy ass Canadian tech.

"If you knew how good I am you would think I'm modest."

They' re American owned now.

I know, but the ATI stuff still goes down in Canada.

"If you knew how good I am you would think I'm modest."

I know, but the ATI stuff still goes down in Canada.

Your mom goes down in Canada.

ORIGINAL: locopuyo

You can even use NVidia scaling and have black bars for resolutions that don' t match. For intsance you can play starcraft (640x480 fixed resolution) on a widescreen monitor and have black bars on the left and right so it isn' t stretched out and distorted.

Explain.

XBL Gamertag: Rampage99

" Basically, pollute the air all you want, your just speeding up the inevitable. Our future generations are f*cked as it is and there' s really nothing we can do about it. Have a nice day "

He' s talking about 1:1 pixel mapping. For example if you have a 1920x1200 screen and you play an ancient game that only runs at a ghetto resolution like SC. You wouldn' t want a 640x480 image stretched to fit 1920x1200, you want a TV that has something called 1:1 pixel mapping, so you have the black bars around the image.

Loco you should have known better before buying a HD TV without that feature. I can see why it' s a nice feature to have in a videocard though.

Blaming ATI for not having 1:1 pixel mapping is like blaming a street pole for not having an air bag after you crash into it.

On new NVidia cards they have both 1:1, scaled with fixed aspect ratio, regular non-fixed scaling, or you can just let your display handle it on it' s own.

HDTV' s don' t use overscan. Only ancient CRTs use overscan. Whoever thought it would be a good idea to use overscan for HDTV DVI out is a complete moron. Do you know what overscan is? It' s where the image gets bigger or smaller depending on the brightness of the image because of crappy CRT tubes. And it isn' t consistent from one CRT to the next. It' s like they expect you to be using a tv from 1986 with DVI inputs. WTF were they thinking?

I' m not saying ATI sux for not having these features, I' m saying NVidia rox for having them. ATI needs to get the basic crap working. Last time I checked they dont' even have mobile drivers for Vista. Their hardware is generally good, but their software side is lacking.

"If you knew how good I am you would think I'm modest."

I wouldn' t know, I never owned an ATI card. I' ve read that their new drivers brought a lot of improvements though.

They have improved a ton. They still kinda suck though.

"If you knew how good I am you would think I'm modest."

Both have their pros and cons. Good thing about ATI is that they' re consistent with driver releases (every month) and their stability is (from what I' ve experienced) better than Nvidia. Problems pertaining to applications tend to get fixed quickly. Nvidia are content to mill around with their heads shoved up their asses for a while before they even realise that there' s a problem.

The one incredibly annoying thing for me is that ATI drivers don' t have automatic per application settings for AA/AF and stuff. You have to make these retarded shortcuts or use a 3rd party application. Nvidia drivers automatically know when a certain exe is run and apply the settings for it on the fly. Why ATI hasn' t implemented something so stupidly simple and desirable is beyond me.