[Nuke]

intel c2d e6700
asus p5n32-e mobo
4 gb 800mhz ddr2
8800gts (ive had this for awhile)
320gb sata seagate baracuda
160gb sata hitachi (from old computer)
sata samsung dvd burner
and a really ****ing cool case



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[Bob-san]

That case is awesome. Is it an XClio A380-BK or A380PLUS-BK? I'm thinking the latter. Awesome rig, dude... also, is that motherboard the P5N32-E SLI or SLI Plus? What OS is on it?

[Flipside]

Very nice, you win on the Processor, I got a 6600 C2D, but I win on the Graphics Card, with an X1950 Pro. Oddly enough, we both went for exactly the same Hard-Drive

[Polpolion]

spiffy

How much did it cost?

[Nuke]

That case is awesome. Is it an XClio A380-BK or A380PLUS-BK? I'm thinking the latter. Awesome rig, dude... also, is that motherboard the P5N32-E SLI or SLI Plus? What OS is on it?

i didnt know about the a380plus till after i bought this, it has an even bigger fan on the side panel.ive got more than enough cooling though, nothing goes over 40c even under a high performance load. i got the sli version of the mobo. im also running 32bit vista.

Very nice, you win on the Processor, I got a 6600 C2D, but I win on the Graphics Card, with an X1950 Pro. Oddly enough, we both went for exactly the same Hard-Drive

not counting the video card which i bought this fall, $1,525.83 usd.

i think im gonna put the xfi in here, im not too happy with the onboard sound.

[jr2]

Don't forget to disable on-board sound in the BIOS, or you might get problems...

[asyikarea51]

Neat.

Would've taken a C2X processor myself, but I know my reason for not doing so all too well...

[Flipside]

Actually, depending on the Soundcard, it's sometimes better to keep the other drivers active, most high-end cards are quite happy with a second soundcard active in the system. I use an E-MU 1212, which is, admittedly, a music-studio soundcard, not a gaming one, and, unfortunately, it's DirectSound support is absolutely awful, and, being marketted by Creative, I'm not holding my breath for updates.

Fortunately, the card doesn't mind in the slightest if I keep the onboard card on and just route DirectX and Mediaplayer through that, whilst using the E-MU for Cubase and ASIO stuff

[Wobble73]

It looks F**king awesome Nuke. 

So what fps do you get in FS:SCP with all MediaVPS and everything maxed out?

[Nuke]

Don't forget to disable on-board sound in the BIOS, or you might get problems...

thats only an issue with old skool sound cards that require a specific irq and memory address range. the xfi is more modern and i dont think it suffers from that. now if i were to use my old sblive im sure id get ****.

It looks F**king awesome Nuke. 

So what fps do you get in FS:SCP with all MediaVPS and everything maxed out?

i havent really played any games yet, im still working on getting all the proper drivers installed and getting this to burn in for abit. the arctic silver takes about 200 hours to interface properly. its probibly been running long enough by the end of today to test its actual capabilities.

couple problems though. both are memory related. im not getting my memory to run at 800 mhz, it only runs at 666.67 dispite being ddr2 800. if i set the memory to the correct speed in the bios i get instability. its high performance memory and it was even on the qvl for the mobo. il probibly see if i cant find a bios update, its an asus so i should have no problem doing a flash. and on the subject of the bios, it seems to like to reset its self on occasion. its supposed to be  a feature so you can reboot out of a bad overclock configuration. but im not even overclocking. even then a bios flash seems to be the best solution.

[CP5670]

Nice setup. What week/batch of the 6700 did you get?

If you want something to show off your system, I think SC: Double Agent may have the best graphics of any current PC game, although don't be surprised if it crawls for you. The previous SC game looks almost as good (equally good except for the character models) and runs far better.

So what fps do you get in FS:SCP with all MediaVPS and everything maxed out?

It should actually be the same as the last generation or two of video cards. FS2 is not very heavy on hardware at all.

couple problems though. both are memory related. im not getting my memory to run at 800 mhz, it only runs at 666.67 dispite being ddr2 800. if i set the memory to the correct speed in the bios i get instability. its high performance memory and it was even on the qvl for the mobo. il probibly see if i cant find a bios update, its an asus so i should have no problem doing a flash. and on the subject of the bios, it seems to like to reset its self on occasion. its supposed to be  a feature so you can reboot out of a bad overclock configuration. but im not even overclocking. even then a bios flash seems to be the best solution.

You may need to set the timings and voltages manually. The boards occasionally don't read the stuff in the SPD chips correctly.

Do you have two 2GB sticks or four 1GB ones? Some boards tend to have issues with four sticks and need slightly relaxed timings for them to work stably.

[Nuke]

im using 4 1 gig sticks. the timing thing is probibly it. this memory is 4-4-4-12, any clue on what theese numbers are to give ma a clue as what needs to be tweaked in the bios? in the past the mobo has always been able to figure it out on its own. but this is the first time ive used high performance hardware.

*edit*
i checked the manufacturer's page and the memory will get detected at a lower speed. however its also rated to be overclocked at 800. so now i get to figure out what settings to change to overclock it properly. i dont think i did it right last time.

[CP5670]

Your problem definitely sounds like it's related to having four sticks, although just to be sure one of them isn't bad, you could see if it works at 800 with only two sticks and then try the other pair on their own. Overclocking with four sticks is difficult, but they should still work at their stock speed of 800. I don't know how good that particular memory is though.

The four main latency ratings they advertise are TCL/CAS, TRCD, TRP and TRAS in that order, but there are several other timings too. The max async latency and read premable settings often have a significant impact on stability, but the optimal settings vary between motherboard/memory combinations. For the main timings, you could try loosening manually them to 5-5-5-15, although it seems that it should be using those by default.

One other thing you should verify is that the command rate is 2T. The nforce boards allow you to use 1T, but it will basically never work with four sticks.

[Nuke]

well 100 test cycles in pc check says theyre good. not a single memory error. i didnt see the command rate setting but i think i saw the other 4 you mentioned in the bios. id have to go back in and see. seems asus released a new bios like 2 days ago and im gonna give it a try. im not sure how to boot this thing in dos, i dont have a floppy drive. im thinking of trying to boot into freedos from my sister's ipod so i can run the flash utility, though im not sure thats safe. or maybe i can flash from a network boot. im not sure if the in windows flash utility works under vista.

*edit*
cool, i got dos to recognize the ipod, no ****ing joke. i had to use some hackish drivers but it worked. now im trying to make it bootable. the freedos installer was able to crate a boot sector on the thing, though i couldnt format the thing. so im formating it with fat 16 now, hopefully if i do the same thing again and copy the system files manually i can make it bootable. its rather freeky. i wonder if it will be restoreable

*edit again*
well i couldnt boot from the ipod but for some reason when i used my freedos boot disk, it recognized my ipod and i loaded the bios from it. after about 20 seconds of twideling my thumbs, which felt like an entire two minutes btw, plenty of time for a stupid squirrel to cross the power lines causing its death, as well as the death of my computer. fortunately that didnt happen  ....this time . turns out my old bios was left over from around december. anyway now that its up to date im gonna try to tweak my memory to work at its full speed.

[CP5670]

A lot of modern motherboards have some sort of failsafe system, where the old BIOS is backed up until it actually boots off the new one. I have started keeping all my machines on UPSs in any case, ever since short power failures suddenly became much more common here last summer.

Does your memory work with the new BIOS?

[Nuke]

no its still getting detected as 5-5-5-15. of course thats how the manufacturer says it works, to get the rated speed you have to overclock, and i take it it was designed for this. still im not too comfortable of overclocking 300 bucks worth of memory, even if its rated for it. not without some form of cooling anyway. then again they do have that gargantuan fan hovering over them. none the less il see what kind of memory coolers are available. im having some trouble runing the thermal monitoring utility that came with the mobo. and i dont want to **** with the memory blind.

[jr2]

Check out Ultra aluminum heat spreaders?

[Nuke]

well the memory already have heat spreaders on them. im sure they got some sort of clip on fan or whatnot.

well i managed to set it to 4-4-4-12, it apears stable but it still only comes up as 667.

[Nuke]

i figure il just post all the memory settings i have and what theyre set to. maybe you can point me to the right one to tweak.

tcl(cas) - 4
trcd - 4
trp - 4
tras - 12
commands per clock - 2 (i assumed that was the t1/t2 settuing you talked about)

ok with those settings the machine is pretty stable. im not to sure about the heat condition, the driver which is supposed relay data to the monitoring program doesnt apear to work. any other settings are set to their bios default, which is auto. those settings are trrd, trc, twr, twtr, tref, trd, trfc, and async latency.

i also have the option to manually set the memory clock. i have 2 options, linked and unlinked. in unlinked mode i can set the memory clock directly as well as the fsb (qdr) clock, which is at 1066. setting the memory to 800 however causes instability. i can also set the fsb and a link ratio. im i right to assume that memclock * ratio = fsb? and does the fact that the memory is ddr and the fsb is qdr? should i throw a *2 in there somewhere?

[jr2]

Umm, DDR = Double Data Rate... I'm assuming QDR = Quad Data Rate??  IDK; my systems are socket A / socket 478 generation.