** Water cooling System Upgrade - Sub zero here I come **

Just upgraded my PC system just in time for Christmas !



Abit IP35-Pro mobo



A Core Duo cpu to replace my awful AMD X2



A ding-dong nVidia 8800GT, it's not green either (memories of ISA expansion cards ! )







I'll change the water cooling rig in the New Year, put a larger radiator on plus add two extra Passive Reservoirs ! I think I shall water cool the Northbridge, Southbridge and power regulators as well. So more plumbing to do .... Hence the temporary 120mm fan over the Northbridge !

The whole system flies, even without a reload of WinXP ! (just updated the drivers, cleaned the registry & defraged). Got a full version of Vista Ultimate to put on, I can then see what DX10 is like for Crysis & Company of Heroes. Crysis absolutely files at High detail levels, mad stuff ! Call of Duty 4 is running at Maximum detail Even at 1680x1050 Adobe Photoshop CS has a 4 second load time ! All this without a reloaded, optimised Operating System

Plus:



Opppss I accidentally bought a new monitor A nice 22" widescreen, hehehehe.

I haven't even got round to overcloking it yet ..... too busy getting ready for Christmas ! This thing will fly, shall see if it'll touch 500Mhz FSB.

 

Sweet as a nut!

I can better that though....






Mines a 24"

 

water coolin, oh my gosh i am sooo far behind in the world of technology. im still running an amd 700mhz

 

Core Duo 2 + 8800GT FTW!!1

 

A few screen shots of Company of Heros (DX9)







Think I might load Vista today to check the DX10 performance etc.

Looks amazing on the 22" LCD

 

Finally plumbed the GT8800 into the water loop Stops the noise from the fan Making it run mega cool at the moment 37C at idle










I'll get a full cover water block for the GFx card in January sometime add in a double radiator and re-plumb it again then

Going to make it work now with a bit of Crysis, might even get an hour's work in on the car later too Or not

 

Holy christ man, Ridiculous

Get vista started!

Did you try out that SP3?

 

Yep XP SP3 is working perfectly

WIll oad Vista later ..... it does mean a 4 hour reload of software apps ... etc.

BF2142 looks fantastic on the new monitor with the Widescreen fixer running it really makes a difference !

 

Very nice indeed Ezy. Thats the same processor as mine and apparently they're not as good as the 6700 for overclocking?. Although with that cooling I'd say you could push it a bit than recommended..

 

Im not jealous

 

Well I have just loaded Vista Ultimate onto my system (32bit) and I'm already starting to regret it ! I remember why I put XP back on after 3 months with Vista this time last year !

The OS is really utter tosh ! Naff GUI / UI. It takes longer to do everything, more clicks, more stupid 'User Steps'. All applications load more slowly than under XP, including games. There really is no justice for all of the extra overheads ! A larger page file, more RAM is occupied by the system, it hogs everything. As for file copying, why does it have to 'Calculate' the time for the copy ? Just 'DO' the copy and save the time trying to calculate the actual physical act of copying hence making it a shorter process ? Duh. File copying is so slow ? I have a 10k Raptor HDD which is about the fastest PATA/SATA hard drive around (except SCSI/SAS/SSHDD). There is no conceivable explanation for such incompetency on Microsoft's part for the total lack of performance of Vista.

The only thing that it has going for it is that they implemented the Win NT/2000 security aspects that they forgot to include in XP !

Can't believe that they actually spent 5 years developing this rubbish. It has the background engine of XP, hence it has 'not' been built from the ground up. It still calls all of the same processes and uses the same dll's that XP uses (with slight modification) and some new API's for the Multimedia. Surely these could just be added to XP and then do away with Vista ! Then we'd all be happy !

RANT RANT RANT .... Ok, relax !

Company of Heros DX10 screenies for you -







My first real look at DX10, not really noticing too much difference. I have the game set to Ultra detail on all aspects. Running well. There is definitely a perceptible difference with the depth of colour (should be obvious for DX10).

I'll load Crysis and see what the differences are ! It will be the only thing that makes me keep Vista on my system !

 

As you say, I cant see much difference between the screen shots.

I didnt like vista when i first started but you learn the quick way arounf it and its just as good as XP.

Everything loads fine for me and i have 2 different systems running it now.
You can turn account control off too. So you dont have to press continue everytime you try to load a program. Is that what you mean?

 

Agreed, you can get rid of a lot of the annoying ****. Then its more like a prettier version of XP.

It certainly didnt slow my PC down, but having 4GB RAM helps i expect.

 

I spent three months last year streamlining Vista and it's still nowhere near a streamlined XP install A shame really.

Yep all the stupidity aspects of Vista are turned off, Hibernation binned, UAC, deleted a lot of the install files. Just trying to see if I can disable the Virtualisation ! Get rid of that rubbish. Plus the backup settings. Running through things again to see what can be done to get it really streamlined To be fair though it took me about 2 years to get XP really streamlined especially after SP 1 & 2 ! Services next, will scrap the ones not needed but that are automatically loaded !

Kind of funny really, I remember when Win2000 came out and I loaded that up, messed around and realised that it was no where good enough for games and multimedia. So I went back to Win98se. Could this be history repeating itself ! ?

Cyrsis DX10 (High Settings + 2xAA)







Cyrsis DX10 (Very High Settings + 2xAA)







I am afraid to say at Very High settings the game is almost unplayable [:^(] I might have to look at tweaking a few things But as per the reviews that exist I guess it'll have to be run with med-high settings for DX10. Yet this game steams along at max settings under DX9

Hmmm work in progress. I'll see what can be done !

 

Looks fecking good though doesnt it!

My new laptop is DX10. Only a 8600gt though so i still dont think it will cope[:^(]

 

Best to turn AA off in Crysis, its seriously cripples performance.

 

Yes I think I'll try that and just have some Anisotropic running. The Very High & Ultra settings really add depth of field and perspective to the game But even a top SLi setup fails to give good performance in this game [:^(]

 

Dual core 6600, 2 gig ram, 8800 GTX etc, it still runs like ****e at 2560x1600

Had to play it at a lower res. [:^(]

 

I have the same problem with my new 8800 GT OC'd, i think you need a dual SLi setup to get the most out of it. They've designed a game thats too power hungry for even the very best PC's

 

Found a Windows Vista update that should help Crysis run well

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940105

PC at the moment is running mega cool



GeForce 8800 GT -

• Idle - 37C
• Load - 44C

Stock Figures





Best Overclock thus far without Volt mods

CPU - 3.4Ghz
FSB - 425Mhz (1700Mhz QDR FSB)
Multiplier - 8x



Perhaps some more headroom yet Still haven't pushed it yet.