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Tuesday, June 30, 2009

post://4306510762466182006/

I received my EVGA 295 GTX Co-Op today and here are the results!

17:45 - Card installed, powered on
18:00 - Drivers Updated, restarted
21:06 - done with benchmarking

Initial observations:
Compared to the 280 GTX:
- same length
- feels heavier
- a tad thinner

Hardware installation included 2 devices (GTX 295)
I left a 280 in there for strictly PhysX for now but going to do try benchmarks both with and without it on both cards.

Test: -/+ for decreased / increased performance

3DMark Vantage (Ambient Occlusion: ON | PhysX: ON): +
Score: 16209
CPU: 33477
Graphics: 13831

3DMark 2006 (Ambient Occlusion: ON | PhysX: ON): =
Score: 13260
SM 2.0: 4953
SM 3.0: 6965
CPU: 3268

3DMark Vantage (Ambient Occlusion: OFF | PhysX: OFF): +
Score: 12415
CPU: 8610
Graphics: 14560

3DMark 2006 (Ambient Occlusion: OFF | PhysX: OFF): -
Score: 13126
SM 2.0: 4830
SM 3.0: 6935
CPU: 3263

GTA IV: -
Benchark @ 1920 x 1200
Texture Quality High
Texture Filter Quality: Very High
View Distance: 25
Detail Distance: 30

Previous (2 x 280 GTX):
Average FPS: 52.01
Duration: 37.55 Sec
CPU Usage: 77%
System Memory Usage: 36%
Video Memory usage 92%

Current (1 x 295 GTX Co-Op):
Average FPS: 48.96
Duration: 37.72 sec
CPU Usage: 78%
System Memory Usage: 38%
Video Memory Usage: 99%

Crysis: -
I was a custom mix of Very High and High with a lower view distance with the previous cards but durring hectic battles I'd notice everything getting really choppy.

With the new card autodetect chose all High
1920 x 1200 was too much for it at first, but after it settled in and had the textures loaded it went relatively smooth and playable. I turned down to 1280 x 800, the next lowest 16:10 resolution in the list but the quality wasn't worth it. The text was way too blocky, and the trees all had squares where light shone in-between the leaves. I turned it up to 2560 x 1600 and it looked really good but and still had similar performance as the other resolutions. Overall I'd say this is an improvement as I can eek up the shaders and the physics with little to no impact in framerate... too bad said framerate is a steady 30 fps or so. I have the latest version and drivers but I remember a past bug in Crysis where it would run worse if you changed the resolution in game so I'll try this one again tomorrow.

NFS Undercover: +
I had it at 1920 x 1200 previously - with medium world effects (I hate the motion blur) all detail set to highest and 6x AA. I had turned off VSynch previously because it was pulling it down to 30 when I was probably getting about 40 or so, but I HAD to enable it with the new card. I was getting at least 60fps easy and even when I turned it up to 2560 x 1600 I had to turn on VSynch to make it not look like everything was in Fast Forward.

Benchmarks really don't gain much over my 2 x 280s and even go down in the game test. That's partly because the new card actually reduces my available video RAM. The RAM is what I had originally targeted as my bottleneck for draw distance in GTA and this isn't going to help at all, I even need to bring it down a little.

I'm not super impressed, especially since I could get the same performance and even better high resolution performance from my 2 (and now much cheaper) 280s. All in all I'm sure if you're running lower resolution you could kick some ass running 2 of these, but good luck with that.

Rendering is faster due to the increased clocks and there is a noticebly higher quality to the image but as far as sheer frame rates go - this card isn't going to cut it for anyone running higher then 1920 x 1200.

My recommendation is that if you're looking for high performance AND high resolution - stick with the 295 GTX 1g+ cards. I'll be waiting for the higher memory cards to come out, and praying my 90 days for the step up program is enough time.

Labels: 2009, 3dmark, consumerism, games, games for windows, hardware, materialism, video

posted @ 18:03

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Sunday, January 25, 2009

post://6816059569584533463/

So I've spent the weekend... well, I guess that could be extended to the past month, doing computer stuff. I placed the hardware order on December 31st (so I could include it in the business costs for 2008) and received them on the 7th or so.

From there on it's been computers, computers, computers. I upgrade my own to free up a power supply and memory for my new Media PC for the living room. I took all the old stuff I had and got a brand new media pc case for it all. It's about the size (amazingly close in size) to my receiver and now have it all nicely arranged in the new entertainment center.

The original order started with Jamie. Her computer was up to the gill in spyware and antivirus and she was looking for a way to record TV. Since the existing setup couldn't quite pull that off I came up with a solution for her - a Media PC / desktop. That got me thinking about an actual media PC for myself and lead to me ordering the new case and replacement parts for my desktop so those old parts would be available for the Media PC.

In any case I came up with a really nice Thermaltake box case (like a shuttle case on steriods) and TV card arrangement. I waited on the TV card for myself until I could confirm if Comcast is QAM in my area. Per my experience with Jamie's PC being plugged into my cabe I can confirm it is not. They give me one digital channel in high quality off the line and it's always an add for a Wrestling PPV. So the only channels on my network are analog and most of those have that little known property that Comcast actually just got fined for - many of the channels say "this channel is still available on the digital teir" to try and entice the $13 a month-ers.

So I was working on 3 computers, more upgrading 1, making another from old parts in a new case and building a new system. Then Joe from Finishline called me. I haven't done business with him in a while - over a year in fact. It got where I was spending a lot of time supporting him over the phone with questions and the like and not getting anything from it. I finally started charging him for phone support and he didn't pay those invoices. I took the loss and moved on but he recently started calling me again when "his computer got stolen". He had taken it to a local shop for repair and they closed up and took his computer with them. They didn't return it and wouldn't return his calls. He ended up getting it back but it had been in the middle of a system refresh and was apart all over the place. He was in a bind and I'm planning on charging full price, so I agreed - that made the 4th.

So here I am in the office all weekend, with multiple computers on a KVM going back and forth between them, installing, downloading drivers, tweaking, and loving it. Of course, my ADD (or so the pamphlets would have me believe) never lets me focus for very long so I'm in and out of the office as things format and download so I'm not completely holed up the whole time. As a matter of fact I even had dinner with my wife last night, then we watched the office (had to resort to Hulu due to the cable issues) and then caught up on the Kyle XY finale from last year (we'll probably check out this season tonight). I then had Nicole try out Civ on the PS3. It's a pretty good game, and she didn't experience anywhere near the performance problems I had. She won via domination but to be fair she was building the United Nations... it just happened that Abraham Lincoln got his panties in a bunch before it could get completed.

So though I've been busy this weekend, but all in all it's been fairly enjoyable. The only thing I might like more is if the office was clean, but I can get around to that once I'm not using it to build. I so need to sort through my stuff and throw out the old parts(PIII and under). As it is I could never receive purely professional customers.

Side note - found this while browsing: The Unwanted Blog
It's got a lot of very cool general interest stuff as well as technological and historical items. A great blend of all things I'm interested in.

Labels: 3dmark, games for windows, graphics, hardware, link, technology, vista

posted @ 13:35

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side note about the link - of course nothing is perfect and though this blog is great otherwise, he does seem a bit bitter about Obama. Just have a little hope, give it some time, and I'll welcome your point of view in a couple years.

By Josh, at Sunday, January 25, 2009 2:09:00 PM

Sunday, December 07, 2008

post://6314627219298098290/

Here's the same progression in GTA benchmarks. I didn't have to do much work for this because GTA writes each benchmark to a separate txt file automatically. I pasted into Google Docs and made a graph of it all.

The details are here but this is the graph:

Labels: 3dmark, consumerism, games for windows, hardware, materialism, SLi, technology

posted @ 11:37

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Saturday, December 06, 2008

post://8239767402186441602/

Ok, so after the dust has settled I've completed the Hard Drive externalization (technical prototype) and here are the past couple benchmarks:

2 x New Graphics Card + CPU

New Graphics Card + CPU

New Graphics Card

New Motherboard

Original

Read em and weep.

Labels: 3dmark, consumerism, games for windows, hardware, materialism, SLi, technology

posted @ 22:51

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Friday, December 05, 2008

post://2095755929140285485/

Latest Benchmark	3DMark06 - 11059
2.0 PCI Ex Motherboard	3DMark06 - 10879
1.0 PCI Ex Motherboard w/ 2 8800 GTX	3DMark06 - 10674

Labels: 3dmark, graphics, hardware, SLi

posted @ 04:21

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Tuesday, June 17, 2008

post://4296121579900533304/

I went back today and found some previous 3DMark06 Scores since I was finally able to get my 3DMark06 up and running. I still had my old VISTA x64 install on my extra HD (haven't needed to reformat it for space yet) so I installed everything (didn't work) and then copied over all the OpenAL32.dll to both system32 and syswow64 directories. I removed 3DMark06 and reinstalled from my Crosshair driver CD (w/ professsional SN) but when I went to submit it said a newer version was available. The patch wouldn't install (said 3DMark06 wasn't installed???) so I just copied the 3DMark folder over as well.

All in all I got it to work, but I'm thinking I need to turn the Cancel or Allow back on, this shit didn't happen when I had it ask me to do everything. I still haven't reinstalled SP1. I'll certainly make sure everything's working proper before I do it, but it's ineveitable.... inevietiiable... invevieitiaitiablale!

So it's running and I got a 10,333 base v1.0 - so here are some past 3Dmark scores nVidia 7800 - December 16th, 2006
Asylum GeForce FX 5900 w/ 128mb RAM

I found these doing a picosearch, still works... just re-indexed - give it a try

Labels: 3dmark, games, hardware, nostalgia, SLi

posted @ 19:38

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Saturday, December 16, 2006

post://277274301891567545/

This is from XP(32 Bit)

Main Test Results
3DMark Score: 5030 3DMarks
SM 2.0 Score: 2488 Marks
SM 3.0 Score: 2403 Marks
CPU Score: 1003 Marks

Detailed Test Results
Graphics Tests
1 - Return to Proxycon: 19.186 FPS
2 - Firefly Forest: 22.289 FPS
CPU Tests
CPU1 - Red Valley: 0.316 FPS
CPU2 - Red Valley: 0.509 FPS
HDR Tests
1 - Canyon Flight (SM 3.0): 22.101 FPS
2 - Deep Freeze (SM 3.0): 25.963 FPS

Labels: 3dmark, hardware

posted @ 00:11

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Monday, December 29, 2003

post://107272154934347185/

I went to the computer show yesterday. First time I've been able to catch one when it's at the ubiquitous Basketball Hall of Fame. It was the first time I'd been in there... ever, pre-construction or otherwise. I can't believe how big a sphere can be. It's amazing, wonderful, and so much to do... for basketball people. =]
I was only interested in the architecture and the computer show held within.

I bought a new case, as I was creating almost another new computer - black with blue bubbles up the side which cast a nice blue glow. It has a window (of course) with multicolored fan which casts more black-light-ish light about the innards. It looks quite nice. I already had a few Pentium 4s -- went with the hyperthreading 2.4ghz I had on hand. I made sure to get dual channel DDR (the only thing similar enough to get me off my 2+ year stint of RDRAM) on the motherboard as well as an 800mhz bus, RAID and SATA. I don't actually have an SATA drive yet, but it's there to improve performance in the future. I went with ASUS for the motherboard, and 1GB of Kingston RAM w/ "heatspreader" (a blue heat-sink type thing). I had to get a new video card too -- couldn't let that hold me back.
I settled with a mid-grade GeForce FX 5900 128mb RAM, 400mhz clock, Asylum brand.

New system:
P4 2.4ghz 800mhz bus w/ hyperthreading
1GB Dual Channel DDR RAM
RAID (60gig, 100gig, 120gig HDs)
Asylum GeForce FX 5900 w/ 128mb RAM, 400mhz clock
Sony DVD-R (500a)
Creative Soundblaster Audigy Platinum

I did my old performance tests, 3DMark 2001, 3DMark2003, and RedFaction comes with a neat little performance test in the setup program.
3DMark2001: 4100 -> 6200 -> 11701 -> 14600 3DMark2003: 430 -> 800 -> 4300 -> 4620 RedFaction: 3200 -> 14200 ->15700 MB/Sec (RAM transfer rate)
The first test was the old system, second test was new system w/ old video card (GeForce 3 64mb), the third test was new system w/ new video card, and the fourth test is single channel vs dual channel DDR. 3DMark2001 with the new card blew the power supply. I haven't run another test yet.

My previous RAM broke all the records with the RedFaction test, RDRAM running at 300-400mhz was more then the 1200 MB/Sec that DDR RAM would get running at 133-200mhz.
My jaw dropped when I saw what Dual Channel DDR could do -- I knew I made the right choice.

That number may also depend on the amount of RAM I have -- I had 512 MB previously, and now have 1 GB - since it's how much can be transferred each second, it most likely calculates that depending on how much RAM is present.

Other then some issues with Windows, things worked great -- I attempted to run it right off the bat and AGP440.drv was causing it not to start. I was able to run setup and repair the installation (re-install it) but had to re-activate and everything. I ran it successfully a few times, then after adding all the fans to the new case I was running some really intensive graphics tests when I heard a loud *POP* and everything suddenly quit.

I was really worried, I just spent a pretty pocketful of change here, and I just blew it all up?!! Nope -- just blew the power supply with my uber-computer. I put my power supply in from my real case (the giant one I had before) into the new one and worked like a charm. Windows now worked enough for me to get a few games in there but I detected underlying problems.

** update 12/30 **
Memory errors in Windows... pulled out one of the Memory Modules, no resets, no bluescreens. I called Kingston to get a new set of chips sent to me (they're paired to work as a dual channel - like RDRAM has been for about 2 years now) so they're on their way as I write this. In the meantime I'm running 1 512mb.

Labels: 3dmark, hardware

posted @ 12:52

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