aelfwyne

Links?

Dunno, the screenshot is nearly unreadable at that resolution.

I just tried this on my 2.8ghz opty 170, x1950xt.... Problem is, it makes my system sticky/jumpy. Even moving the mouse stutters with FAH GPU running! It doesn't do this with the non-gpu client. I checked the priority, and it is set to "Low" already - yet it is hogging the video card so hard apparently that I can't even use my fracking computer. What's with that?

This doesn't work for me... It shows my account as the owner, but I cannot even enter the directory - it immediately pops up an "Access Denied" box regardless of the fact that it shows me as owner with full control... Problem I have is I have 7 hard drives(!) all of which ended up with system restore info in them under XP. I have now installed Vista, and short of REFORMATTING all 7 hard drives, I can't seem to get XP's old system restore off of them! Same thing happens with recycle bins (where you get multiple recycle bins, the current, and the old unused ones) but those I can delete. What gives here, and why is MS being so bitchy about letting people delete this stuff even when you manually take control of the directory?

I have searched this thread and not found the answer to my question. Please refrain from flames if this has already been asked/answered. My system configuration is two IDE drives in RAID 0, and two SATA drives running independently. XP is installed on the RAID 0, and I want to run Vista on one of the SATA drives. The install went mostly okay, except that Vista did not put the boot loader onto the RAID, thus making me have to select boot drives from the BIOS screen if I want to load Vista instead of XP. That wouldn't be so bad, except for the fact that even once loaded, Vista does not see my RAID. It sees the two IDE drives from the RAID as individual 160gb drives, not as one 320gb RAID. This is VERY BAD, because not only can I not access my XP drives, but Vista keeps prompting me to initialize one of the two drives!!!! Device manager shows the RAID driver loaded, and if I try to install the downloaded RAID driver from nvidia, I get told that a newer driver is already installed. I read here, as well, that the final Vista does indeed have the RAID driver. Then why in the nine hells doesn't it see my RAID?

I just got Neverwinter Nights 2, and have been extremely UNhappy with it. The gameplay is great. Camera control mediocre. However, the FPS is cr*p on my system. I read about it being demanding, etc... but I just have an incredibly hard time believing that it can be this demanding. I have an x850xt video card, with an Opteron 170 at 2.7ghz currently. 2gb of system ram. FEAR plays without any slowdowns with very good quality settings, as does Oblivion. In fact, anything I've thrown at this video card is pretty good so far. Yet, when I toss NWN2 on it, it treats it like I have a an old tnt2 or something. I have turned resolution down to 1280x960, turned off antialiasing, turned off anistropic filtering, turned off most of the shadows, turned off bloom, turned off environment lights, etc, yet I still get around 8-10 fps in many circumstances. A few scenes will ramp up to 30-40 fps, but when I'm in the village at the start, or in the fort not long after, FPS rates crawl down to nearly unusable. There doesn't seem to be ANY improvement no matter what I turn off. I feel like I've been ripped off on this game. With these levels of performance, I've got a game that with a $600 video card could look like every other game does on my <$150 video. On my <$150 video, it looks like I've moved back to 1998. I'm not willing throw money at this to fix one frickin game, when the most demanding games on the market run perfectly well as far as I'm concerned. An x850xt is not new, but it is hardly junkbin material at this point. Does anyone else have NWN2 and know if perhaps there is some magic fix (ie, a compatibility issue that can be solved), or did they just not bother to tweak the graphics engine at all?

I guess I don't get the point of "budget" soundcards. Either you want premium sound, in which case you pay for it, or you use the onboard sound, which on any recently modern motherboard is indistinguishable from budget sound as far as I can tell. The only reason I can see for a "budget" soundcard, is if your motherboard either doesn't support multiple outputs (ie, surroundsound), or the sound on your board died. As far as CPU overhead for sound.... not an issue really on modern CPUs either. So why buy budget soundcards? Perhaps I'm missing something here.

I upgraded from a socket 939 3400+ (2.2ghz, 800/1600 hypertransport) NewCastle core chip on an Asus A8V to the Opteron 170 on the DFI board below.

I debated long and hard before upgrading my single core to dual core. My system was fast enough. I rarely do video encoding (if ever), and gaming honestly does not benefit much yet from dual core, especially the games I play... Yet, I discovered that it really DOES make an impact on my computer usage. Besides the usual computer-snappiness, it has made my work easier. I have a work-at-home job that involves editing documents in a javascript application within my browser. A full editor comes up on one half of the screen, and an image of the source document comes up on the other half. All edits are tracked and checked by a very complicated javascript system. On my old system, the interface would frequently freeze, often when selecting text, or applying formatting. Freezes would last from 5 to 10 seconds. Even when it didn't freeze, the javascript was sluggish. This is with FireFox since IE isn't supported, due to the lack of several key features. On dual core, however, the interface is extraordinarily snappy. Somehow, whatever the holdup was in Firefox, is alleviated by having multithreaded capabilities. While the javascript itself obviously is not going to be multithreaded, somehow firefox doesn't get hung in whatever wait state it used to on the single core. Additionally, the tons of elements load and render much quicker on-screen... I have heard people say that you don't need anything more than a celeron for "web browsing".... Well, that isn't necessarily true if you're running web applications (that aren't particularly well programmed) for your job. It really CAN make a difference.

Now if only I could get the x850 version for that price and availability.

Logitech LX7, though I didn't get the ubercool black/blue that is in the linked page. I got silver/light blue... meh. It is an invisible optic cordless optical. The best thing about it is the battery life is phenomenal compared to other opticals (even other Logitechs). Yeah, what do you have against Logitech, HG? They do you wrong?

From what I've been told and read, the difference is not measurable on a card such as yours. A 6800 series card doesn't come close to using all 16 lanes, and 8 lanes will do fine. However, I don't remember where I saw the benchmarks to back this up.... so best thing for you to do, is benchmark it, try the move, benchmark it again, and see what happens. Be sure to set the jumpers to SLI mode, otherwise you'll be at 2x instead of 8x.

What's wrong with having CD/DVD on IDE? The way I see it, they won't use the speed of SATA, might as well save ports for hard drives which can actually take advantage of SATA.... But, if you must. Sounds like a good deal.

My x850xt seems to like to generate black triangles randomly. Just often enough that it is extremely annoying, but not so often as to make anything unplayable. They're barely visible, edge of polygon type artifacts. I've seen this in a couple of games, but it seems worst in Civ 4, but isn't exclusive to it. Thing is, the card isn't overclocked. Scanning for artifacts with ATITool or ATI Tray tools finds no errors either. Is this a flaw with the ATI x850? I had an x800 that didn't have this problem on my older AGP board. EDIT: I've been reading that this problem can be caused by having Temporal Anti-Aliasing enabled.... however, I don't see anywhere to turn this off or on... Anybody?

I'd go with that X1900... nVidia may have the 8800, but ATI is still a damn good card for midrange. Myself, I don't understand why anyone bothers with SLI or Crossfire, unless doing it with top-end cards. For what two cards cost, you can buy one better card and get better performance and fewer compatiblity issues. It just doesn't make money sense.