Time for new computer: Graphic card

[Strazos]

Yes, both front fans are blowing in.

Chip: AMD AthlonXP 2700+ (yeah, older chip). The white paper on the chip said something like 80c or higher for max operating temp, so I stuck the shut-off temp at like, 75c. I'd have to go back into BIOS and look to be sure.

[sinij]

I figure it will cost me at least $700 or so to do an overhaul on my system. At least I don't have to start worrying about it until Vista comes out.

DRM much? Why would you ever upgrade to Vista?

[Engels]

Yes, both front fans are blowing in.

Chip: AMD AthlonXP 2700+ (yeah, older chip). The white paper on the chip said something like 80c or higher for max operating temp, so I stuck the shut-off temp at like, 75c. I'd have to go back into BIOS and look to be sure.

An AMD getting that hot is just not normal. Do you have a rear fan? In essense, are you getting the air blown in one way, blown out the other? If you do, I have a sneaking suspicion that something's up with your heat sink; perhaps the thermal paste needs to be reapplied. There's an art to this, aparently. You can't goo it on there. It has to be thin enough that it conducts heat straight to the heat sink, yet not too thin that its not making contact on all surfaces.

Still, I can imagine that with modern games your CPU is working full time all the time while playing, so high temperatures aren't that odd. Do you have it overclocked by any chance?

[Trippy]

My bad, I did mean rear and front fans. Are they both blowing air in? Or is one taking and one flushing? By the way, what chip is it and what do you have the turn off temp set at? Intel as you know is rated to run far hotter than AMD.

No the Athlon XP (he said he's using Socket A) runs as hot as the equivalent P4. E.g. an Athlon XP 2700+ (running at 2.1 GHz) has a thermal power design of 68W. The 2.6 GHz P4 has a thermal power design of 62W, and the 2.8 P4 is 68W (the older Norwood design, the Prescotts are quite a bit hotter).

The Athlon XPs also don't have a heat spreader, nor do they have a built-in thermal protection cutoff, nor do they clock themselves down if they get too hot (all features that the P4 has) and the Socket A socket has a crappy heat sink attachment mechanism. In other words the Athlon XPs are harder to keep cool, IMO, than the P4s unless you are taking about the high end Prescotts of which there's no Athlon XP equivalent (have to get an Athlon 64 for that).

You may be thinking of the Athlon 64 which is a cooler design (in the literal sense of the word) than the P4.

Edit: changed XP 2600+ to 2700+ (has same TPD as the 2600+ according to the spec sheet)

[dusematic]

With Windows XP Professional, is 3 gigs of RAM better than 2 gigs?  I mean, I know there's a limit to how much it recognizes, not sure about cost/benefit though.

Depends on how many applications you like to have open at once. I'm happy with 2 GBs but YMMV. There are games out there that will easily swallow 700 MB+ of RAM so if you have something like running and 1 GB worth of other apps running you are starting to get close to swapping territory since the OS will gobble up 128 MB+ by itself unless you go through and strip it down.

what do you mean by swapping territory?  basically i heard its not worth it to put 3 gigs in, because the performance gain is small.

Unless you happen to be using a RAM disc the only real performance benefit you get for adding lots of RAM is to keep Windows from swapping memory contents to disc (I'll ignore the fact that even if you TURN OFF paging Windows will still do it). That is what kills performance. Reading and writing to disc is much much much slower than reading and writing to RAM.

To give a simplified example, let's say you have 512 MB of RAM and let's say Windows XP by itself is using 128 MB of RAM so you have 384 MB of RAM for other stuff. Now let's load up, say, Firefox which is a ridiculous memory hog and use that for a while. Then we'll launch Word and use that for a bit and then Excel, which strangely seems to be taking a while to load, and then switch back to Firefox...and kerchunk kerchunk kerchunk your disc drive starts thrashing around like it's possessed. That's cause there wasn't enough physical memory for Windows to fit all three apps into RAM at the same time so it "swapped" the memory Firefox was using onto the disc drive when you loaded Excel (which is why it took so long to load) but when you switched back to Firefox it had to read that info off the disc back into RAM.

If you go to Task Manager under Performance you can see how much of the disc swap space it's using by looking at the Page File usage (swapping is also called paging as in writing a "page" of RAM to disc). Now Windows XP will always use some amount page file even if it doesn't really have to (and even if you turn off virtual memory, *sigh*) so it can be hard to tell without some experience if adding more RAM will cut down on your swapping but that's what it means when people talk about improving performance by adding RAM and why you may have heard that going from 2 GB to 3 GB is a small performance gain -- it doesn't actual increase performance unless it cuts down on the swapping, which for most people it wouldn't since they aren't filling up all 2 GBs.

Thanks man, that was interesting and very thorough.  I guess I'll be doing 2 gigs.

[Strazos]

I figure it will cost me at least $700 or so to do an overhaul on my system. At least I don't have to start worrying about it until Vista comes out.

DRM much? Why would you ever upgrade to Vista?

Um...new bells and whistles....ability to actually use the full amount of my HDDs...DX10...a 64bit OS....To get rid of the headaches involved with using a "borrowed" key that won't let me download SPs...


@ Engels: Yep, got 2 fans blowing in, 1 blowing out back, 1 blowing out top. No, I don't have it overclocked. I'll probably take a look at it tomarrow or Monday.

[Sky]

I've never been a fan (sorry) of top or side fans. I like the front to back action with as little whorling as possible.

[Engels]

Looks like Trippy just explained your heat problem, Strazos. I used to run an AthlonXP and it did run fairly hot with high demand game. I upgraded to a AMD 64 about a year ago and have been safe as houses since. Your fan set up looks good, your cpu fan seems like a good solution; unless you're storing the computer in the oven, I can only think that you're pushing the processor too far with the newer software out there.

I use an Athlon XP at work (my old box, to be precise) and I have three fans going on it. The two front and back ones, and a top fan as well. Its so loud my coworkers hate me for it, but what the fuck else am I going to play Eve on, I ask!? And this conversation reminds me why I had to put in the extra top fan; with the Gforce Ultra 5600 I put in it, the combined heat would have let me roast small game hens inside.

Sky; side and/or top fans are only a compliment to the requisite front and back fans. Only 'necessary' if you're running into situations like Strazos is.

[Sky]

I'd replace the fans with higher airflow models. Like I said, I am skeptical as to the benefits of side/top due to whorling.

[Engels]

I'd replace the fans with higher airflow models. Like I said, I am skeptical as to the benefits of side/top due to whorling.

What is this whorling of which you speak? As far as top or side fans, I'd only have them sucking air out.

[Strazos]

Wait...so it's actually possible that my little ole CPU that could...

"She just can't no more, cap'n!?"

/Scotty

I wasn't aware a CPU would allow me to push it beyond it's limits like that, without overclocking and all. But again, I'm going to pop the heatsink off and see what's doing, maybe apply a fresh layer of Arctic Silver (I sure hope it hasn't gone dry after all this time, even in the sealed tube).

Also, I'm gonna see if I can move the tower out of it's stupid cubby...it may not be an oven, but with the heat emanating off my aluminum Lian-Li case, the heat has nowhere to go really, so it's not too far off from an oven.

[Sky]

Cubbies are teh debil! Adequate venting area around the case is important.

Engels - The goal is to get a solid front to back airstream that blows over anything that gets hot (hard drives, ram, cpu, gpus). A couple fans located in front (a higher one to blow over hds, a lower one for unimpeded airflow) and a couple in back (aided by the PS blowing out, you could also block up one outflow hole because that causes turbulence as well) is what I use. I feel that introducing a side intake fan impedes the front-to-back flow, a side outflow decreaases the airflow as well as introducing turbulence (whorles). A top fan reduces airflow over lower components like the gpu by drawing air upwards.

I was considering using a plastic hose to vent air from my ac unit directly into the pc in the summer :P I also had a plan to build a pc inside a central air duct. But good old fashioned airflow has served me pretty good, I don't o/c (much).

[Engels]

I personally like those boxes that have a side-fan and vent shaft over the CPU so that all hot air generated by the CPU gets vented out exclusively. I've seen a number of 'older' Dells use this and it seems to work very well for them. The new Dells don't have this, which to me is just indicative that Dell's slowly declining in quality. They're still good machines, but it used to be that I'd sooner trust Dell to build a good solid box, since they were known for all sorts of testing. Heck, at work our main data server is -still- a Pentium III 800 mhz machine, still going strong, servicing over 80 people. Now, I'm not so certain about them.

[Trippy]

I personally like those boxes that have a side-fan and vent shaft over the CPU so that all hot air generated by the CPU gets vented out exclusively.

Doing it that way is actually blowing the air the wrong direction in an ATX-style case. You want to be blowing room temperature air through the side vent duct over the CPU heatsink. If you have a top vent and fan, that's where you suck the hot air out of. The problem with the ATX case design is that the air coming through the front of the case (assuming it has openings) typically gets heated up passing over the hard drives before travelling to the CPU section. There's already a rear fan that will suck out the heated air that's passed over the CPU so using the side vent and fan to suck more air out will help somewhat but it doesn't solve the problem of the hard drive heated air going over the CPU heatsink.

[Engels]

I personally like those boxes that have a side-fan and vent shaft over the CPU so that all hot air generated by the CPU gets vented out exclusively.

Doing it that way is actually blowing the air the wrong direction in an ATX-style case. You want to be blowing room temperature air through the side vent duct over the CPU heatsink. If you have a top vent and fan, that's where you suck the hot air out of. The problem with the ATX case design is that the air coming through the front of the case (assuming it has openings) typically gets heated up passing over the hard drives before travelling to the CPU section. There's already a rear fan that will suck out the heated air that's passed over the CPU so using the side vent and fan to suck more air out will help somewhat but it doesn't solve the problem of the hard drive heated air going over the CPU heatsink.

Heck, I just reverse the direction of the fans. The fan on the front by the hard drives blows air out, the one on the back by the CPU blows air in.

As to the fans installed direcly over or with a duct straight to the CPU on Dells, I can't swear to it, but I do not think they are blowing air up and out, but down and in. Regardless, isolating the entire CPU through the duct is clever, wether its getting fresh air from outside or sucking the hot air generated by the chip out. Its as close as you're going to get to having a full blown outdoor fan blowing on the CPU with the case removed.

[Trippy]

I personally like those boxes that have a side-fan and vent shaft over the CPU so that all hot air generated by the CPU gets vented out exclusively.

Doing it that way is actually blowing the air the wrong direction in an ATX-style case. You want to be blowing room temperature air through the side vent duct over the CPU heatsink. If you have a top vent and fan, that's where you suck the hot air out of. The problem with the ATX case design is that the air coming through the front of the case (assuming it has openings) typically gets heated up passing over the hard drives before travelling to the CPU section. There's already a rear fan that will suck out the heated air that's passed over the CPU so using the side vent and fan to suck more air out will help somewhat but it doesn't solve the problem of the hard drive heated air going over the CPU heatsink.

Heck, I just reverse the direction of the fans. The fan on the front by the hard drives blows air out, the one on the back by the CPU blows air in.

That can be tricky though cause the power supply is exhausting hot air back there and the heated air from your video card potentially has further to travel (thereby heating up other components) before being exhausted.

Regardless, isolating the entire CPU through the duct is clever, wether its getting fresh air from outside or sucking the hot air generated by the chip out. Its as close as you're going to get to having a full blown outdoor fan blowing on the CPU with the case removed.

Yes the ducting is a good idea and Intel tried to force it upon manufacturers with its BTX case spec since they were having so many issues cooling their high end Prescotts. Unfortunately for them virtually all the case manufacturers refused to make BTX cases except for some specialized applications (e.g. the Shuttle "P" chassis borrows some of the BTX ducting ideas).

[schild]

Yea. My shuttle has some crazy ducting going on.

[Lantyssa]

If you do, I have a sneaking suspicion that something's up with your heat sink; perhaps the thermal paste needs to be reapplied. There's an art to this, aparently. You can't goo it on there. It has to be thin enough that it conducts heat straight to the heat sink, yet not too thin that its not making contact on all surfaces.

I wanted to emphasize this, just in case.  Keep the paste as thin as possible while covering all of the contact to the heat sink.  Too much and it acts as an insulator.  I have seen machines run tens of degrees cooler by making sure this was done properly.

[geldonyetich]

I know the conversation's sort of shifted in the direction of cooling, but I've done a little research on the question of graphic card upgrade.  (Nothing like a MMORPG I'm playing (CoX) playing like crap for me to seriously consider an upgrade.)

Right now there is a bit of a hurdle for those of us who still have an AGP motherboard.  If we want a really good graphics card, we can't just upgrade the card, we need to upgrade the motherboard as well.  This is because the vast majority of good graphics cards these days use PCI-X slots.  I heard there are some adapters that convert an AGP port into a PCI-X port.  I wonder if they'd be worth the cost... probably not. 

The best all-around performance you can get for an AGP motherboard is the Radeon X850 XT Platinum.  It currently performs competitively with any other card out there.  The problem is that when it comes time to upgrade to PCi-X (and that time is now) this card will be useless.  This makes it a poor investment.

It looks like what I'd really need for a graphics card upgrade is around $800-$1000.  That's for a setup like this:

Dual Core CPU and a PCI-X motherboard that supports it.  There's some cheap Dual Core CPUs out, such as A Pentium-D with 2.6 Ghz cores for $130.  Tack on another $80-$120 for the motherboard.  Last I heard, the standard 128 pin PC2700/PC3200 ram works on these motherboards fine, so no need to upgrade that immediately.

With PCI-X motherboard secure, it's time to upgrade the graphics card.  Knowing how awesomely my SLI setup worked back in the 3DFX Voodoo2 days, I'm jumping back on that bandwagon.  Cheapest way to do it is the GeForce 7950 GX2 for about $600..  It's basically a SLI setup built into one card.  It's cheaper than the alternative, two $450 cards and a $100 bridge between them.   I hear that NVIDIA driver support currently hasn't entirely caught up to fully exploit SLI, but once it does I fully expect to see SLI setups outperforming single cards for half a decade.  That makes it a good investment in my book.

Back from fantasy land, however: Full time college students don't buy $1000 worth of computer equipment.  Full time workers do, provided they're not up to their necks in other debt.  For that matter, looking at a $1000 cost for PC gaming builds a strong case for console gaming.  Might as well stick with my AMD 3000 XP+ and Radeon 9800 Pro setup (similar to the original poster) for awhile more.   But, the above is my "coming into an unexpected windfall" plan.

[Strazos]

Back from fantasy land, however: Full time college students don't buy $1000 worth of computer equipment.  Full time workers do, provided they're not up to their necks in other debt.  For that matter, looking at a $1000 cost for PC gaming builds a strong case for console gaming.  Might as well stick with my AMD 3000 XP+ and Radeon 9800 Pro setup (similar to the original poster) for awhile more.  But, the above is my "coming into an unexpected windfall" plan.

Pfft, this is why you take out school loans that total above and beyond tuition and fees. 

As an aside, there's no way I personally am ever going to be spending $600 just on the video system for my PC.

[geldonyetich]

Precisely my thinking.  PC game designers who expect their users to spend $650 to play the less than three games that need that kind of firepower strike me as unreasonable.  City of Heroes/Villains probably wouldnt' need such a thing, except it's a clunky sobbich.  I wonder if my issues with frame rate in it have to do with my hardware or some kind of ATI hate.

[Strazos]

I've played CoH before, on max settings, with my 9800Pro 256 just fine. I'm thinking if I can get my heat problems under control I can squeeze at least another year out of my system before going over to a 64-bit setup.

[geldonyetich]

Recently?  Like, Post-City of Villains release recently?  At that point they had retooled CoH/CoV's engine hard.  It used to run very smoothly, now I'm experiencing a massive drop in framerate.  I've the same video hardware you do, except 128 MB on the card instead of 256.

[Engels]

CoV ramped up its graphics quite a bit; my gf had to buy a new puter for it. Then aparently Issue 7 introduced physics card code that otherwise gets handled by your CPU (if you don't have a physics graphics card, which noone does), so that's another performance hit.

I am one of those people that got the ATI 850 Pro as a last hold out in AGP land, and it runs CoH well, but not fabulously well by any stretch.

All in all I think it was a bad move by Cryptic to alienate players by making the graphics that much more demanding, especially since, in my opinion, the graphics quality has suffered from it. That hazed out city background make the game look dumbed down and crowded.

[Trippy]

Right now there is a bit of a hurdle for those of us who still have an AGP motherboard.  If we want a really good graphics card, we can't just upgrade the card, we need to upgrade the motherboard as well.  This is because the vast majority of good graphics cards these days use PCI-X slots.

PCI Express = PCIe
PCI Extended = PCI-X

The best all-around performance you can get for an AGP motherboard is the Radeon X850 XT Platinum.  It currently performs competitively with any other card out there.  The problem is that when it comes time to upgrade to PCi-X (and that time is now) this card will be useless.  This makes it a poor investment.

No the best non-workstation class AGP video card you can get is the 7800GS. And neither the X850XT (which doesn't support SM 3.0) nor the 7800GS perform "competitively" with any other card out there as you can see from the benchmarks (and those benchmarks were done last year, there's a new generation of even faster cards out now). 

Dual Core CPU and a PCI-X motherboard that supports it.  There's some cheap Dual Core CPUs out, such as A Pentium-D with 2.6 Ghz cores for $130.  Tack on another $80-$120 for the motherboard.

You'll need to recalculate that this week when the Conroe's hit the streets and the AMD price drops take effect.

Last I heard, the standard 128 pin PC2700/PC3200 ram works on these motherboards fine, so no need to upgrade that immediately.

Only certain very rare chipsets like the SIS 649 (which isn't made anymore AFAIK) support both DDR and DDR2 RAM. And even if you found one that did current Intel CPUs run their memory buses faster than the 400 MHz used for PC3200 so you would either have to seriously overclock your RAM to match what the Intel CPU would like or underclock the memory bus gimping memory performance.

Edit: I take that back. The Intel 915 chipset family can use either DDR or DDR2 (bus speed issues still apply). However the 915 doesn't support the Pentium D.

[geldonyetich]

PCI Express = PCIe
PCI Extended = PCI-X

I stand corrected.

No the best non-workstation class AGP video card you can get is the 7800GS.

A PCIe version is being reviewed in that article.  I'd need to see a comparitive AGP benchmark.  Considering the 7800GS is half the price, I suspect it isn't as fast as the X8500 XT PE, but I could be wrong.  Regardless, we're discussing AGP cards here, which I think we're in agreement one wouldn't be buying unless they're cool with blowing money on a dead end anyway.

[Trippy]

A PCIe version is being reviewed in that article.  I'd need to see a comparitive AGP benchmark.

My bad, try this one instead. Note that both cards came overclocked compared to the reference 7800GS (460 MHz and 400 MHz vs the default 375 MHz).

[Glazius]

CoV ramped up its graphics quite a bit; my gf had to buy a new puter for it. Then aparently Issue 7 introduced physics card code that otherwise gets handled by your CPU (if you don't have a physics graphics card, which noone does), so that's another performance hit.

I am one of those people that got the ATI 850 Pro as a last hold out in AGP land, and it runs CoH well, but not fabulously well by any stretch.

All in all I think it was a bad move by Cryptic to alienate players by making the graphics that much more demanding, especially since, in my opinion, the graphics quality has suffered from it. That hazed out city background make the game look dumbed down and crowded.

Uh, you can turn off bloom, depth of field, antialiasing, antiisotropic whatthehellever, physics particles, and the dip-in-molten-plexiglass effect they put in with I7. (they've even made a global graphics slider so you can turn everything down at once) Supposedly this results in the same graphics and graphical load as launch.

I occasionally play on a junky laptop with a junky Radeon Mobility and aside from the graphical memory straining when I run up to 50 heroes at once it's smooth.

--GF