Partners

We go through life almost inevitably with one. We all do. They don't have to be human. Your partner I suppose could be your car, your tv, your computer. But they can only fill in poorly for your real partner who in the ideal world is in fact, very human.
As I lay to bed tonight I thought of my wife, how she goes to bed with the thought of me being there for her and she being there for me. What would life be like without her, almost incomparable, almost incomprehensible. I want to think of her in this moment. I want to write it down. Her excitement to see me as I wake up, as I come back from work, or from anywhere. To be able to be completely ourselves with each other. For her blind faith in me, my abilities, and my future, our future. All will be well, all will be exciting and all will be tolerable... As long as she is there.

Alanis great stuff

MSI not ideal for upgrade?

Recently I decided to upgrade my computer, stick in another 4 Gb of PC2-6400 mem(same as my existing 2Gb HPC Reaper series). Unfortunately at the same time I decided to migrate to Vista 64 bit, and also stick in another Samsung Spinpoint 501LJ and use the onboard intel raid controller, so when I started getting BSOD's left, right and center, I had very little clue as to what the problem was. Intially I thought it was the raid controller (I decided to have 2 volumes, System with 64k stripes and Data with 128k stripes) hence I played a lot with that and then finally settled on a single volume with 128k striping(I wish I had stuck to the original plan). Since the BSODs started usually when I was playing Lord of the Rings online, I was led to believe it was my Graphics card and its drivers for 64 bit Vista, especially when the error reported atikmdag.sys as the culprit for crashing.
This led to me rolling back, uninstalling, reinstalling, and everything else you usually try with drivers. With still no luck at system stability, I reverted back to checking my new memory, this is when I noticed that when I had my new memory also installed and therefore had all DIMM banks filled, that the memory clock would revert to 667Mhz even though all my memory banks were supposed to be running at 800Mhz, so I tried to force it to 800Mhz to bios. Windows would not even boot. I tried various overclocking(as well as underclocking) options but still no stability.
Alright, so something funny is going on with the memory, well I was relieved to have narrowed down my problem to some extent. So I downloaded and burned memtest86 and burned it to a bootable disc and started testing my memory sticks...
Right so initial tests with all DIMMS filled, in various different slot options and various different frequencies, including stock, the results were always similar, billions of errors within an hour.
So to find out what the problem is, I removed the new RAM and ran the test, no errors at all. So I took it out, removed the old RAM, put new RAM in, and ran the test again, no errors at all again(guess I cant send it back to the vendor), so I tried moving the memory to the other banks on the motherboard, and still no errors, but when I put all the memory back in, billions of errors again!!! So... MSI wont let me fill my memory banks!! I've now taken the original 2gb I had out and am running with the new 4gb at 4-4-4-15. The system seems stable in windows now, I have yet to confirm if this will stabilize my gaming, if not then I guess I still have ATI problems.
In any case, I hope MSI will come up with some bios update or similar that will fix this issue. I think I shall stick my perfectly working Reaper PC2-6400 (2Gb) up on ebay.

Benchmark at default GPU frequency

My brother made a good point yesterday, why burn out your GPU and reduce life... well I've only been stressing my card a bit to see what difference overclocking can make... and as I dont even need it to perform so well with the current games I play since they are incredibly smooth anyway, i thought i would take my card back to defaults and not overclock it at all. However, I have my cpu still at 3Ghz and thanks to my liquid cooling it only heats to 47 degrees at full utilization during 3dmarks cpu tests... and even more interestingly, it takes about a few seconds to return to 33 degrees after the benchmark... so I am confident my cpu is happy and can be pushed even further should I choose to.
I'm using a gadget to monitor my cpu core activitity and it tells me all 4 cores are kicking at 100% during the test which is a relief to me as there's nothing worse than under utilizing your specs... core 3 and 4 for some reason are 1 degree higher in temperature than 1 and 2... (of course I'm not sure about the accuracy of these tools as yet..) So here it is... ATI radeon HD2900XT at factory default and overclocked
Q6600 cpu at 3GHz....

Components Your System
Processor Intel Core 2 Quad 3005 MHz
Physical / Logical CPUs 1 / 4
MultiCore 4 Processor Cores
HyperThreading N/A
Graphics Card ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT
Graphics Driver ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT
Linked display adapters No
DirectX Version 10.0
System Memory 2048 MB
Disk Space 476.94 GB
Motherboard Manufacturer MICRO-STAR INTERNATIONAL CO.,LTD
Motherboard Model MS-7345
Operating System Microsoft Windows Vista




The RESULTS:

Below is the result details of your submitted project.

Main Test Results
3DMark Score 11469 3DMarks

SM 2.0 Score 4469 Marks
SM 3.0 Score 4854 Marks
CPU Score 4208 Marks

Detailed Test Results

Graphics Tests
1 - Return to Proxycon 34.626 FPS
2 - Firefly Forest 39.863 FPS

CPU Tests
CPU1 - Red Valley 1.373 FPS
CPU2 - Red Valley 2.064 FPS

HDR Tests
1 - Canyon Flight (SM 3.0) 43.976 FPS
2 - Deep Freeze (SM 3.0) 53.104 FPS

I think this card does well actually, and I have a sneaky suspicion than it will do ok once they optimize for DX10 and we get some good DX10 benchmarks out there... and then if needed... i will get rid of my stock cooler for the GPU and put some good cooling system in.

Notice something....???? SM2.0 results are actually higher on default than an earlier overclocked speed... this is probably because i've had my card to prioritize performance over quality... it only concludes to me that 3dmark at demo version will only judge based on the number of frames per second and not on the actual quality of what we see... which is ok i guess... coz i didnt notice any difference...at least at this level of 3D mark.... but i like this... these settings will do for now.

further gpu tweaking...

Main Test Results
3DMark Score 12115 3DMarks
SM 2.0 Score 4740 Marks
SM 3.0 Score 5217 Marks
CPU Score 4209 Marks

Detailed Test Results

Graphics Tests
1 - Return to Proxycon 36.926 FPS
2 - Firefly Forest 42.079 FPS

CPU Tests
CPU1 - Red Valley 1.355 FPS
CPU2 - Red Valley 2.092 FPS

HDR Tests
1 - Canyon Flight (SM 3.0) 47.386 FPS
2 - Deep Freeze (SM 3.0) 56.961 FPS

gpu speeding

Tweaked my graphics card a bit to get more juice... at peak, it went to about 86C and crashed... so now I've got it stable running at around 750Mhz and a decent temperature... results below:

Main Test Results

3DMark Score 11607 3DMarks

SM 2.0 Score 4496 Marks

SM 3.0 Score 4924 Marks

CPU Score 4295 Marks



Detailed Test Results


Graphics Tests
1 - Return to Proxycon 34.762 FPS

2 - Firefly Forest 40.176 FPS

Overclocked

I've now overclocked my fsb from 266 to 300 MHz making my cpu clock at 2.7Ghz (it was 2.4 Ghz) My memory now runs at 750Mhz(1:1 ratio)....
3DMark scores:

Main Test Results
3DMark Score 11273 3DMarks
SM 2.0 Score 4395 Marks
SM 3.0 Score 4904 Marks
CPU Score 3852 Marks


On my stock settings I had a 3dMark score of 10700... so there is a difference so far... i shall run it for a while this way and then think of cranking up later...