Quick [tech] Questions Thread

[schild]

Anyway, why should I NOT put three video cards in it?

Because it probably has zero to do with the graphics cards. I'd wager it has more to do with memory leaks, caching and generally shitty code. I bet if you strip everything, reformat and only install TS3 and never anything else, it'll run like butter.

Get her a netbook for everything else. Har.

[Yegolev]

Anyway, why should I NOT put three video cards in it?

Because it probably has zero to do with the graphics cards. I'd wager it has more to do with memory leaks, caching and generally shitty code. I bet if you strip everything, reformat and only install TS3 and never anything else, it'll run like butter.

You are correct but I have discovered that the real reason is that the PCIE slots 2 and 3 are too close together to hold a pair of 5850s, so I can't physically get three in there.

Anyway I have to buy a PSU first.

It might just be the game trying to access 1.3 gigabytes of data...

Yeah, when she said that, I made this face:


Then when the PSU shot fire and smoke, this was me:

[Salamok]

Anyway, why should I NOT put three video cards in it?

And then the PSU exploded.

You know for the cost of those 3 video cards, some serious cooling solution (unless you spaghetti monstered your wife's rig as well), the bitchin new sound system to overcome the jet engine that is now her case and that new 1200 watt PSU you will need to run them you could just go get her a nice 160gb Intel SSD which should load those 1.3gb of textures incredibly fast.

[Salamok]

Hey anyone have some software and settings they would recommend to rip my DVD collection to my PC for streaming to my PS3? 

I'm already using the w7 media server and have that streaming fine I just wondered how to convert my existing DVD collection to some aXXo quality (700mb per movie) ps3 compatible files.

I'm hoping this will prevent me having to repurchase the Little Mermaid over and over again, Disney needs to start packaging their crack in brown paper bags so the kid doesn't feel the burning desire to play with the DVD's.

[Yegolev]

you could just go get her a nice 160gb Intel SSD which should load those 1.3gb of textures incredibly fast.

This is not out of consideration, but I'd be interested in making sure the bottleneck is disk-read.  The dead PSU has bought me some time.  My list is currently some sort of PSU +500W, two 5850, some "aftermarket cooling", and a SSD.  Probably another 4GB RAM too.  Unless, of course, I can demonstrate that it is one or more bad CC items.

[Lantyssa]

I really don't think the video card was your problem.

Disk access and memory are probably the biggest concerns.

[01101010]

2 quick questions. I upgraded my DDR2 from a pair of 1gig chips to a pair of 2gig chips. I have two pairs of slots on my gigabyte board and for shits and giggles plugged them all in. Now my gigabyte board was pretty cheap but its fairly flexible in overclocking and whatnot - but its ez-mode since it color codes the slots into pairs, red and yellow - so yes they were paired appropriately. Plugging them all in, fired up the machine and it auto-located all 6 and booted fine. I superficially checked the mem with cpu-z and the 2gig chips were reading ok but the 1gig chips were severely under clocked. A lot of bad noise and a BSOD/reboot later, I figured I would remove the old pair of 1gigs and see if the new pair was the culprit. Tore down the box and pulled the 1 gig pair out. Running stable now with just the two new 2gig chips but would there be any reason the 1gig pair would make my pc unstable? The ram is PC8500 with 5-5-5-15 @2.1V (same manufacturer), for all 4 chips but the pairs don't seem to play nice with each other. I had the 1 gig chips in the pc for over a year now so I know they were stable. I have no issue with running 4gigs on this WIN7-64bit machine, but 6 should have been ok unless I missed a day in school.

Also, why would a mobo autoset ram to a 5-7-7-24 2.0V timing? Is this an issue of a default setting or a board that is unable to read the mem correctly and runs it on a slower latency at a lower voltage for safety reasons? When I built this box I noticed the timings were off and manually set them in the BIOS (though completely forgot to set the voltage to 2.1V which was a fun 45 minutes wasted). However, when I plugged the new ram in it again defaulted down to the 5-7-7-24 timing. Manually reset it and upped the voltage and its running stable, though I am curious as to those timings.

[Salamok]

you could just go get her a nice 160gb Intel SSD which should load those 1.3gb of textures incredibly fast.

This is not out of consideration, but I'd be interested in making sure the bottleneck is disk-read.  The dead PSU has bought me some time.  My list is currently some sort of PSU +500W, two 5850, some "aftermarket cooling", and a SSD.  Probably another 4GB RAM too.  Unless, of course, I can demonstrate that it is one or more bad CC items.

If you are serious about the SLI you may want to aim for a PSU in the 700+ range.  I still think your issue is more related to disk access and a SSD probably has more noticeable performance impact than any other upgrade you could do.  If you were experiencing problems like screen tearing or freezing I would say more vid card and RAM but what you described earlier sounded like a texture load type of thing and the bottleneck there is disk access.

If you read any of the reviews most of them say an SSD doesn't make actual game play faster but they do all but eliminate load time when starting up or zoning (aka loading new textures).

Then again maybe your goal is to justify all these expenses to the wife in the name of "fixing the problem" then once the system is totally pimped and nothing is left to spend money on you go for the SSD and actually fix the problem.

[Engels]

stuff

Basically, ya, all mobos will set ram timings to a default 'safe' level; it can't read the timings on the ram's spec sheet, since those are timings are not set in the ram itself. Its just that the manufacturers know that they will run at those timings well.

As to why you can't run two pairs, its unclear to me. Were you manually setting the timings at the time when you put all 4 in, or did you let them autoconfigure at 'loose' timings? Also, can you define 'severely underclocked' regarding the two 1gig sticks in CPU-Z? Do you mean that they had lower hertz ratings than the 2 gig sticks?

[01101010]

stuff

Basically, ya, all mobos will set ram timings to a default 'safe' level; it can't read the timings on the ram's spec sheet, since those are timings are not set in the ram itself. Its just that the manufacturers know that they will run at those timings well.

As to why you can't run two pairs, its unclear to me. Were you manually setting the timings at the time when you put all 4 in, or did you let them autoconfigure at 'loose' timings? Also, can you define 'severely underclocked' regarding the two 1gig sticks in CPU-Z? Do you mean that they had lower hertz ratings than the 2 gig sticks?

When I plugged all 4 sticks in, I let the mobo set them. Perhaps severely underclocked would not be the appropriate way to put it, but the 2gig sticks were EPP 400 and the 1gig sticks were EPP 333. It ran for about 30 minutes before getting cock-eyed and resetting. I then manually set the timings and voltages and it lasted all of 5 minutes before puking up blue screen memory dumps.

[Engels]

And you're absolutely sure both sets of ram, the 2x2 and the 2x1 are both PC8500 with 5-5-5-15 @2.1V ?

[01101010]

And you're absolutely sure both sets of ram, the 2x2 and the 2x1 are both PC8500 with 5-5-5-15 @2.1V ?

Yes. OCZ 1066 PC8500 with 5-5-5-15 @2.1V on the labels. 1 pair 2gig, other pair 4gig. I will check tonight, but I may have missed something in the BIOS, either I forgot to set the voltage when all 6 gigs were in or something. I am going to feed the box the 6gig and check the mobo manual and see what shakes out. I really think this is my own error somewhere, but won't know till I get in there and make some ozone shred some years off my life. I'll check back when I fuck around with it. I just wanted to know I wasn't crazy thinking all 6 would run being the same manufacturer, speed, and timings only with different sizes.

And trust me, I can live with 4 gig - but I'd rather not have 2gig just sitting around the desk with no purpose.

--edit: after playing around with it (and watching my computer BSOD and freeze three or four times) and checking various gigabyte and tweaker/overclocker forums I come to find out its my board that is shafting me. It has major problems pushing 1066 if all the chips are not the same. If I lower that down, it will involve more fucking around than my patience will allow at this point. Suffice it to say, I got what I paid for in the board and the 4gigs running now is stable @ 1066 5-5-5-15 running at 2.15V. So meh...

[Venkman]

Question: I juse AVG (free), and it seems to work well. In that I haven't had a problem yet, except with LinkScanner which "blocks dangerous websites and checks links on the most popular search engines for threats".

The problem is that with this feature happens, I have a 25% chance of timing-out on any web activity, from opening a page to switching views in my online banking to posting on F13. I don't know what exactly was causing the timeout, just that it was this feature which is the culprit.

I disabled that one features of AVG, but I rather liked the theory behind it. Anyone else experience this problem?

[Reg]

I had a problem that has kind of the same symptoms but it wasn't related to AVG at all. For some reason I found myself getting intermittent DNS failures when using Firefox. If I hit refresh a couple of times the page would load but it was annoying. After putting up with it for weeks I finally did a little investigating.  Over on the Firefox website they claim that it's really caused by a bug in my router (in my case a DSL wireless modem/router) but they had a fix that I could make by editing the about:config page.

I made the change a couple of days ago and haven't had the problem since so it seems to have worked.

Anyway, here's a link to the problem and solution in case any of you are having this:

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/forum/1/548813?s=DNS%20failure&as=q

[Venkman]

Thanks. And sorry for the double post. After some research (and because it impacted all of my browsers), it turned out to be the LinkScanner thing. I think it's because the LinkScanner is constantly comparing where you're going to their own server-side database.

[fuser]

Just a heads up for anyone buying a hard drive soon.

WD is flipping over to 4k sectors on any drives designated by the "EARS" or "Advance Format" line. None of these drives are recognized by XP.

You have to run a alignment utility to use the hard drive with XP or run Vista/7. I'm caught out because it's for a Windows Home Server which is based on Server 2003 which has no native support. The drive will have a single partition for my datastore so I can use the jumpered offset legacy support.  

Edit:
AnandTech has an article with tech details of the new 4K sector switch over.

[01101010]

Just a heads up for anyone buying a hard drive soon.

WD is flipping over to 4k sectors on any drives designated by the "EARS" or "Advance Format" line. None of these drives are recognized by XP.

You have to run a alignment utility to use the hard drive with XP or run Vista/7. I'm caught out because it's for a Windows Home Server which is based on Server 2003 which has no native support. The drive will have a single partition for my datastore so I can use the jumpered offset legacy support.  

Edit:
AnandTech has an article with tech details of the new 4K sector switch over.

Is it wrong that I read that whole thing and actually found it interesting? 

[Sky]

I did, too. Then sent it along to a bunch of people. I missed that at some point, nice to have the heads-up.

[Sheepherder]

Question: Anyone have a GIGABYTE GA-P55M-UD2?  The chipset drivers on the supplied disk and website all seem to be for RAID controllers, but the Engrish in the manual is a tad bewildering.  To install or not to install?

[Venkman]

Question: ok really baffled here.

I have two MS Excel 2007 files. I try to copy dates from one file to the other. In the process of copying from File A to File B, the year increases by 4 years and 1 day.

I have tried everything, from linking the data to converting it to text. In addition to just manually typing the dates myself, I also "wash" it through Notepad (copy to Notepad, paste, copy out to File B). This is fine since there's not that  much data yet. But in time there will be.

What the heck is going on? There some document property in File A that says "subtract whatever date is entered by four years and one day"?!

Edit: Think I found something. An option called "Use 1904 date system". Does anyone use that at all? Sure nuf when I uncheck it, all the dates lose four years and a day. Why the hell does this option exist?

[Lantyssa]

Some legacy program that Excel can import data from would be my guess, without bothering to do any search.

[Trippy]

Mac support

[NiX]

5 devices trying to access a network through ethernet. 4 port router. Easiest solution for getting that 1 extra device connected to the router? Would it work connected a hub to one of the ports and connecting the last 2 devices to that?

[Engels]

Probably. Unless the device is a toaster. Then you're SOL.

[NiX]

Probably. Unless the device is a toaster. Then you're SOL.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUU!

[Salamok]

the easiest solution would be to just upgrade to an 8-12 port router.

[NowhereMan]

Accidentally deleted a video on my camera (Canon S90) while wiping my blurry shots. What's a good way to get it back? I've tried a few image recovery tools but none of them seem able to detect the camera. Windows picks it up no problem but it identifies as a camera rather than a removable hard-drive and none of the programs pick it up while looking for removable media things either. All they return are my 3 physical drives and CD drive. All the on-line tips just say to d/l one of these programs and seem to assume that they'll work fine.

[rrazcueta]

Anyone have headset or mic recommendations?

[Yegolev]

Sennheiser.

[Pennilenko]

Anyone have headset or mic recommendations?

Plantronics

[Engels]

I've gotten a plantronics in the past. Although the sound quality is good, the comfort level was bad.

[Kageh]

Sennheiser.

+1 vote for that. Or AKG, they make some very good headphones.

[NowhereMan]

Elaborating on earlier question: Problem is pretty obviously that the memory card loads as a logical drive inside the camera rather than the computer. I haven't got a card reader device so is there any way to take an image of the whole card and try data recovery that way or am I just going to have to get some way of reading the card directly to do it?

[Yegolev]

Want to rip a cdrom but WMP sucks.  Suggestions?

[Trippy]

Want to rip a cdrom but WMP sucks.  Suggestions?

http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/