New Rig

It's a gaming motherboard too & I think I set the bios for high performance which may have altered the timing and affect the benchmark detections.

Congrats, I have the same board paired with a e6750 overlocked to 3.68, and I LOVE it!

I wanna play the new game "The Witcher", what is the best video card. I have a Radeon 256 but the game calla for a 512.

bigpaulie426 wrote:

NVIDIA seem to have the upper hand still. Last time I checked, the 8800 series was still top of the range, but it's rather expensive.

Hey Deity, does your set up look anything like this?

agnomenamedgrimblekrumble wrote:


WOW!!!!! That's friggin awesome!!!

[/b]

But it's just too clean and neat to be somebody's real working setup.

There's probably a tiny little "for display purposes only" tagger somewhere in the photo.

agnomenamedgrimblekrumble wrote:

How many PCs are there in that pic? I think I can make out 3 desktops (the one split across the 5 monitors at the back, the one split across the 2 in front and another in that little screen at the bottom left (could be a laptop?) There's 2 cases at the top left which I assume are behind the multi-displays. Something of an excess of keyboards & mice too!

Also, how do you play games on something like that? The split down the monitors must be infuriating, even assuming you could get it to accept whatever bizarre mode it's using.

Oh, and do the cases have a panel cut out so you can see inside?

I've had my new machine (using the same motherboard as Deity) for just under two weeks now. The cpu is a 2.4 core duo (it was supposed to be a quad core but I slipped on the ordering and got the duo instead, I'll get over it) and I have 4G of RAM in it.

There are a few settings I should change in the BIOS/CMOS whenever I get the motivation. I haven't decided if I'll put my audigy 2zs sound card in it or not. I'm about half deaf or so now so high fidelity isn't really a concern any longer but I've definetly noticed that the onboard 7.1 sound can't keep up with large online Call of Duty battles like the card could.

One issue I see with the motherboard is that the hardware monitor usually shows the cpu temp being close to 15 degrees C cooler than the case temp (20 to 34) unless I put a decent load on the cpu and then the warmest I've been able to get it is in the high 20's. My initial prognosis is that one of the temperature detectors is fucked but I'll pay attention to it as the coming months get warmer and I happen across additional reading on it.

The other issues seem to be software related - there is something that seems to be icon related that causes folders with avi and rar files in them to close (due to an unknown error) if I have the folder view set to thumbnails. And it really doesn't like it if I have the windows media player runnning on the desktop (minimized it is ok) when I open a mahjong game. The screen goes black and I get a horrible industrial noise and the only way out of it is to power off and then restart. I think that is just a video compatibility problem from the cheap clunky mahjong game.

I'm weary of reloading software and as far as sorting through my bookmarks it is a tedious process. Maybe I should make a thread in the gallery section to encourage me to get through the smut ones.

otiscleotus wrote:
Probably best to finalise the system ASAP, just in case you tweak something that breaks Windows & have to reinstall.

otiscleotus wrote:
I've noticed that the CPU is cooler than the case on my system too. I put it down to a good CPU fan.
Speedfan can check the core temperature, which is more accurate for thermal monitoring.

otiscleotus wrote:
Sounds like a driver problem. Are you running Vista or XP?

otiscleotus wrote:
Whenever I build a new system, I end up with a stack of files from the last system & can't work out what to do with them.

It looks like I got rid of some problems (i.e. that WMS idle that won't close when sutting down the computer) by uninstalling Nero 7. The only reason I had that loaded was for the lightscribe feature but as I have no lightscribe discs to burn I can get by without it and go back to Nero 6.

The lockup with mahjong and Windows media player I'll attribute to the clunky mahjong drivers. Not a problem as long as I minimize the media player or use a different one (for some reason wanker marketers have decided I have to have multiple duplicative media players on my machine so they always have yet another one bundled in with their software and hardware applications).

Oh, and I'm using XP, not Vista for which I continue to read about the same problems over and over even though it's been out for more than a year now.

Going through the motherboard manual I've noticed that all of the default settings for the BIOS/CMOS are set for XP and Vista except this one: SATA Port0-3 Native mode (Intel ICH9R southbridge) which has a default setting of disabled for pre-XP operating systems. I've enabled it but am wondering if the manual might be in error or if there is some other reason I should have it disabled (I am using one SATA hard drive and master/slave IDE dvd drives).

And since I have plenty of unformatted space still on my hard drive I'm also considering trying to create a 1 gig FAT partition on it so that I can load and run some old favorite DOS games with a boot floppy disk. I'd like to find out if I can do that before taking the chance on screwing up the hard drive and having to reformat and reload everything all over again.

otiscleotus wrote:
Good choice!

Quote:
It's a bit of a legacy thing. In legacy mode, the BIOS will map it to the location used by an old-fashioned AT-compatible ISA IDE controller. In native mode, the BIOS will treat it as a normal PCI device and map it to a free location in PCI space.

The chances are that if you switch it now, XP will throw a wobbly (almost certainly an "inaccessible boot device" BSOD) so I wouldn't recommend it. You might get away with it but I wouldn't count on it.

Quote:
I once built a system where the first partition had DOS 6.22 installed. My main problem was the lack of sound drivers- most modern chipsets claim to be soundblaster compatible but games just don't seem to understand this. You might be able to install DOS (6.22 or FreeDOS) on the partition (needs a bit of fiddling with the BOOT.INI file) but you're probably better off using DOSBox or another emulator unless you want your sound limited to the internal speaker.

Some useful links:
http://www.dosbox.com/
http://www.freedos.org/

I'm finding it odd that my old 2002 version of XP that I just reloaded on a new hard drive (the old one croaked after 5+ years) on my now old machine acts more stable despite the hundreds of patches and updates it took compared to the late 2007 XP I put on this new build.

I remember having some sound issues when I last tried running DOS stuff on a Windows 98 or even 95 years ago. And instead of trying to make a FAT partition on my hard drive I think I'll get a thumb drive and format and dedicate that to DOS games.

Ultimately I think I just have to get this new build "broken in" such as you would do with a new pair of shoes. I went through the BIOS/CMOS again today but didn't find anything I really wanted to change. The next thing I want to remember to do is to check out how my RAM is functioning since that is one of the issues Deity brought up for this motherboard when he started this thread.

otiscleotus wrote:
Yeah, sounds like it could be a chipset and/or driver problem. A BIOS update might fix it but I'm always a bit cautious about those because they could leave U with a dead motherboard.

Quote:
That's probably a better idea as the BIOS should support USB booting & U can do an installation without having 2 worry about confusing bootloaders etc.

Quote:
It's better not to fiddle too much with the CMOS as that tends to make things break.