Shaun

I hardly ever play games on the PC..... but it is xmas and I havent bought anything for about a week!!

T4molie

Cheers for replying fella

How do you find the CPU cooler... noisy or quiet?

Andy

Shaun

Hard to tell as I have case fans (x 4), two graphic card fans and CPU cooler!

I have now overclocked the 5770's and installed todays release of ATi drivers and I am blown away by the improvement. Same Crysis benchmark as previous is now over 88fps!

Changing the set-up to DX10 on "Very High" settings, with 8xAA @ my monitor res of 1920x1200 gives me 52fps. Well chuffed with that! I can't believe how good these 5770 cards are in crossfire. I have run the Resident Evil 5 bench, with everything on max at the 1920 res with 8xAA, and it returned over 92fps. I'm not sure I will even bother upgrading from these GFX cards now, as RE5 is more representative of mainstream stuff and this set-up eats those type of requirements.

Happy Days!

dunx

iTrader: (3)

I must be getting old..... as I've just slowed my AM2 6000+ down and fitted a Zalman cooler to the HTPC, also swapped my two Tb of DVD's into the case.

IT's quiet now ! Just need a silent 5770 to add HDMI and I'm happy.

dunx

GC8WRX

I used to have an amd fx60 well cooled running at 3.4, my new e6750 and mobo are overclocking heaven and i have it running 3.6 on air at the moment, it will be running 4.1 when my corsair hydro arrives via santa, i have two cooled and overclocked gtx 260 v2's, and i get top frame rates at 1680 x 1050!



My super pi (1m) was 28 with the fx60, 19 with a standard e6750 and 15 with the overclock, ill post up results tonight after work, ill do a 3d mark score too, last one with the fx60 was 15k i think, that was with one gtx 260 too!

Shaun

Is that 3dmark06 or 3dmark vantage?

Shaun

Just ran 3dMark Vantage and achieved 17498 overall. Not sure how good that is.

StickyMicky

I suspect that for a while at least PC gaming specs will not have to increase as much, the way i see things going, as that a lot of new PC games will be x360 ports, yeah they may come with nicer textures and stuff, but they are still basically games made for, what is now considered a middle of the road type system.

You look at some of the big PC games released recently, Resident Evil 5, Batman, Street Fighter 4, Red Faction Gurrella, Op Flashpoint: Dragon Rising, etc etc, they are basically just X360 ports with some graphic adjustment options and some higher res effects/textures.

I suspect with MS now pushing the Games for Windows LIVE quite hard, this will help to get a lot more consoly type dev teams on board, especially how they will be implementing DRM with the service in the future (each games key is linked to a gamertag)


Bottom line as i see it, excluding the inclusion of DX11, i reckon the majority of the PC gaming market coming up will end up running quite well even on a miodle spec pc system.

Any PC exclusives will no doubt beef the graphics up a bit (ie crysis 2) but i dont think we will see to many of them in the next few years due to development costs.

When i installed Dragon Rising, and maxed out the graphics, i was running at 120+fps, and my system is not what i would consider extreme, this recent release game was not even taxing my system.

Shaun, if you dont play games, what do you use your system for?

bioforger

iTrader: (1)

To boast on net forums about

Shaun

roflol @ bioforger

StickyMicky,
Everything else but gaming. Normal everyday business apps, web design, 3D modelling, photoshop, encoding, sequencing etc etc. So it's not all about game benches.... the CPU, GPU and OS have made quite a difference to a lot of the "intensive" apps.... but that is boring to talk about!

I suspect I should really change and start using it for gaming as well though.

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

Just when I eventually go quad core (Q9550) someone goes and gets a i7

Yet to OC it, as my PSU is getting a bit hot and flustered (Its a near silent PC, so it gets a bit warm in the case, despite five fans ticking over).

Seems to have good OC potential though, as the CPU runs cooler than my old e6400. I think the Skyth Mini-Ninja has alot to do with it (its the biggest heat sink that will fit in the HTPC case ).

Will toy with it over crimbo, may SLi it - but a pair of 1920x1200 resolution PVA/MVA monitors are on the top of the list first. I've been pineing to go back to 1200 lines for years since swapping from CRT to LCD.

StickyMicky

I suspect you may get around 4ghz from it to be honest, which is more then enough IMO

Cant say i have struggled yet with only 3.3ghz from my q6700!
A lot of the Arma2 chaps have had to turn off HT in the bios on the i7 otherwise it slows the game down to much, infact is seams to slow it down more then just running it on a Q style chip

StickyMicky

Well after reading this thread today while bored at work, i started researching other peoples clock speeds.

For some reason i seamed to hit a brick wall with my q6700 @ 3.31ghz, raising the FSB a smidge over this just seamed to prevent it from booting up, and then the bios would revert it back to a safe known setup to restart.

Seamed strange, but after messing about with the ram dividers, voltages and such, i figured i just had a bad chip for clocking compared with some.

Tonight i have been having another play and wondered what would happen if i dropped the mutiplier and raised the FSB to compensate, could i creep over 3.31ghz?

NOPE! foiled again

So i went back to my x10 multiplier and then figured i would try raising the fsb well past my current limit just to see what happened, and now i have this

3.51ghz

Needs proper stress testing/tweaking and stuff, and i may have more to find (some people have had the q6700 to 3.7ghz on air so i was hoping around 3.6ghz) but i am not so sure my "Blue Orb Mini" heatsink will work well enough when the voltages start getting cranked up further....


Strange that the system would not boot at 3.32/3.33/3.34/3.35 ghz, yet it booted fine with 3.51 ?!

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

Could be a board issue.

With my old e6400 on an Asus p5ld2, it would throw hissy fits on certain clock speeds, yet be ok on faster speeds. I swapped the motherboard for a Gigabyte EP45-UD3P and it would hapily run anything I could throw at it; Temp issues aside, of course.

StickyMicky

Played around 40 mins of Arma2 after i posted my result and when i quit Speedfan claimed my cpu temp was at 72degrees


Not sure how accurate Speedfan is, but i think that its a little to high for my liking, so i am on a quest to drop the v-core to find out how little juice i can use.

StickyMicky

I have sacked Speedfan off.

Started using "coretemp32" this seams quite good as it gives you the Tj.max temp which is the point your cpu does not like and starts dropping the multiplier to cool itself down.

My Q6700 seams to have a Tj.max of 100 degrees.

I tried running 3.6ghz and needed around 1.5v v-core to get it running, it booted into windows fine, but the idle temps right after boot, were high 50`s so i suspect my Thermaltake Blue Orb2 cooler is not enough to keep things chilly.

I backed it down to 3.51ghz again and started working on the v-core voltages to see how low i could get them.

1.4/1.42/1.43/1.44 so far have resulted in a crash while gaming, currently testing 1.45v, if i remember rightly this is what i was using last night so it should be fine, i think the Q6700 can only safely handle up to 1.5v although i have read reports of people pushing them to 1.55v and getting 4ghz from them

2.66ghz to 3.51ghz with an air cooler is still a pretty good result IMO!

Shaun

I'm very impressed how easy and stable the i7's clock. 2.66 to 4ghz on air is a fair old whack with a straight 5 minute overclock. Very impressed with the Gigabyte EX board.

StickyMicky

I reckon my q6700 is capable of getting near 4ghz, i just need to sort some better cooling out.

After doing some temp logging, i had a high of 2 degrees before hitting Tj.Max, this was after a 4 hour gaming session

Cant under volt it any more as it does not like that, but 4 hours straight, in probably the most intensive CPU game on the market is what i would consider stable, even if it was almost glowing like a shuttle re entering the earth's atmosphere.

Anybody got some suggestions for a better CPU cooler?, this Thermaltake one is not cutting the mustard.
I have this one at the moment

StickyMicky

Ignore the request, just found this
FrostyTech - Best Heat Sinks & PC Cooling Reviews