XFX Geforce 7600 GT 256meg - �130 inc postage.

Hynix (same as my current ram) 2 x 512 meg Ram - � 80 inc postage.

�210 overall, and should keep me going for a bit. I think a good idea seeing as I haven't upgraded anything in 3 years.

Will moan about problems installing, shortly ;). 

I would have posted mine, except they are nowhere near as good as they should be with the second monitor running all the time. :) 

The thing that always amazes me about upgrading components, is just how much fucking brute force is needed to get them in the damn machine. It's more like DIY than computing...

Finally after numerous abortive attempts, I wedged the bastards in the slots hard enough to have 2 gig Ram. Yay for me ^_~ 

ram is especially hard to wedge in there... and i'm always worried i'll snap one or something if i push *too* hard :P 

e 

Scrote.

It's not a matter of weakness more a matter of being wary of hammering in delicate pieces of hardware.


Anyway, it appears to me, given that I am able to view stuff, that I managed to install the 7600 successfully.

BTW, XFX has the most complicated packaging I've ever seen. Is it supposed to modern art or just irony? 

http://www.legitreviews.com/images/reviews/312/xfx_7600gt_box.jpg

;) 

yeah my mate bought a 7800gtx from xfx and the case was a nightmare to open, used a serrated knife in the end to just rip it apart, luckily the gpu was ok =) 

How is the new hardware shamb?

Give us your timedemo score in doom3 (best of 3) I am interested in the peformance as my mates wants to upgrade "on the cheap".

Oh and err, just in-case you are unsure, bring down the console in doom3 and type "timedemo demo1" and then just let it run. 

Yup.

That's the one. You've got to unfold the outer X, then release the inner X, then open two flaps on that to get the box out, then seperate the card box from the manual etc box, then open those seperately, and finally get the card out of the plastic. Genius.

Daz, will do, can't promise it will be spectacular tho... 

1024x768, 4xAA, Ultra settings - 40.3 FPS.

Certainly better than with the Radeon where 1024x768, 2xAA, High settings wasn't playable at all (had to run 800x600).

If anyone thinks that is too low, don't bother whining about it "Omg Shamb u suxx", just tell me what I can do to improve it. 

If you have one. 

. 

sounds right, good speeds there :)

have you tried 1280x1024 with 2x AA, imo that looks better than 1024 with more AA but its just my preference. 

i'm a big fan of running in higher res with less AA. although, with my current hardware, that's not really good these days. :P 

it is a problem at times that my monitors native resolution is 1280x1024 when new games seem to chug a bit at that res and lowering the res creates those ugly resampling artefacts you get on tfts... 

have you guys ever heard of video card drivers causing a monitor to flicker and have strange artifacts?

ever since i installed the new ati drivers, my monitor has been flickering like mad every once in a while. but it also happens when i uninstall the drivers (running in that default vga mode or whatever when no drivers are installed) and when i installed omega drivers.

is it just a crazy coincidence that my monitor is going to die soon or can there be an actual reason from the drivers? (maybe some file that got installed with the ati drivers and didn't uninstall afterward?) 

Just got a TrackIR 4. What it does is tracks your head movement via IR, allowing you to in realtime, use your head to look around in games. Mostly for flight/racing sims, but I know of one FPS that supports independent head movement - Armed Assault.

I've been using it in Falcon 4.0 Allied Force, MS Flight Simulator 2004, IL-2 Sturmovik, GTR 2.

You can also use it in games that don't support Track IR out of the box, by using mouse tracking mode, but I have not tried that.

Demo video, theres plenty more around:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c8wmsD7604 

i had to replace my motherboard, and so that meant a fresh install of windows.

the thing is, one of my hard drives, a 300gb ata is showing up as unformatted (in fact, in disk management, it's showing as 128GB unformatted and 170gb as unallocated).

i don't see why that hard disk would have been erased, and i'd really like to get it running as it contains most of my games, specifically stalker with my current save games... o.o

is there something i forgot to install to make windows recognize larger hard drives or something? i have a 200gb ata that's working fine though. 

it's a 48-bit LBA issue: http://www.48bitlba.com

If it is, you may need to apply XP SP2 before mounting the big disk. 

isn't that only something you do with new hdds?

as far as i can tell, there's nothing to mount, it's there, but whenever i try to access the disk, windows asks if i'd like to format it. 

connecting it so Windows detects it. If you were already running XP SP2 when the disk was detected, I guess it isn't a 48-bit LBA issue.

You also say that you have a 200GB disk working, which also implies that your system can handle disks >128GB. I assume you're using NTFS for all this.

Otherwise I don't know. 

i usually end up with the really wierd and oddball problems :P

i'll hang on a little while longer and keep searching, but eventually, i'll just cave and reformat the pos. :\

just fyi: i am indeed running sp2.

what really confuses me is why it got split up into 2 partitions, one of 128gb unformatted, and one of 170gb unallocated. before the reinstallation, it was just one huge partition.
it seems like it just somehow spontaneously blew up during windows' installation. o.0 

I had that. My 300gb was not recognised as one big partition, I just lived with the split.

No idea what causes it, but I think it's a MB compatiility with windows (without any of the sps) issue. 

so is there a way to recover the data on it then?