PCFormat Forum Archive

Very nice Stiggy!

Just now the weakness of my graphics card sticks out like a sore thumb *sigh*

Must also do something about the lighting. Took one of the ccfl tubes out as with the full ATX mobo I have nowhere to put it. Must try find those NZXT led case lights, or something similar

I recommend you get the new AMD platform for speed and upgradability

dude I have already gone down the intel road(again) as AMD just did not wow me. They are not as bad as many would have you believe but still just not cheap enough

AMD is only viable when you go FM-series with the integrated gpu. But as soon as you can buy a cpu with dedicated GPU and your money can get an i3 intel is the only way to go.

True. I saw this article on toms hardware where it appears even the humble pentium gives some FX's a hard time....and the Pentium's cost around R700 or less

PCF's end to end AMD article did not sit well with me. Nowhere did I see them comparing those cpu's to equivalently priced Intel setups.....just a unnecessarily pricy 3570k setup. But if the AMD CPU's were cheaper than they currently are then maybe there would be some sense in going there but otherwise intel is the way to go

Pentium giving FX a hard time!?

The one thing I didn't take into account though is upgradability and system life cycle.

AMD you have a 5+ year life cycle on cpu or board. This makes it the best option for gamers with little money and that keeps building a system.

Intel has a 3 year life cycle that deminishes to 1 year once a new socket is released. If cpu or board goes its a replacement on both.

However that was never the question asked in anything. The question is: "I have money, what is the best I can buy with it?" and the answer to that is intel. Unless you say "I have money and needs to last 5 years worst case scenario" then I might say AMD if your willing to sacrifice technology and performance.

Yes from that it seems pentium does. If that is true then pentium's are a bit unfairly overlooked for gaming(not so great with video encoding and such)

Although I plan to keep this setup for possibly the next 5 years I thought that by that time maybe you will want a all new mobo(who knows maybe they would have done away with DDR3 by then, or you might want more usb3.0 ports)anyway so gave AMD a miss

Sweeta! Nice upgrade bruv!

Any plans to get a new GFX?

Yep. a 650ti, maybe 7770 or if the 7850 suddenly becomes a bit cheaper one of those

MSI geforce 660 OC twin frozer 3 is R3k

THE_STIG wrote:Also had to mount the heatsink the way I did since it sort of clashed with the heatsinks on the ram

Why don't you mount it sideways but have the fan sucking air through to the exhaust at the back? I can see that working. Or put your RAM into the other channel and then the fan should fit - there won't be any performance issues, I'd bet. That's unless the board won't allow it, which would be a bit weird.

True, could try that. Thought about putting the ram in the other slots but then maybe I would want to add more ram at some point which would require me to remove and remount the cooler again

Seems to work fine the way it is, if I become bored during the apocalypse I shall mount it with the fan sucking air through

Just one question. Does anybody else have issues with lucid viru and just about all the call of duty games?

Is your game crashing in single player? Have a few clan mates complaining about crashing in black ops 2 with the horses.

Have not tired the singleplayer. But the mp game play in cod4, cod waw and mw2 is very choppy with virtu enabled

You have 8gb ram right? Have you tried disabling page file? And do you have the latest nvidia drivers? 310.70

Yep 310.70. Latest version of vitu MVP

Will give the page file a try

Well tried turning off page file. Made no difference...but windows booted faster though

Besides that all is well, build quality of the mobo is a bit on the flimsy side compered to what I have been used to from gigabyte but otherwise no problems. The sound card on this mobo aint bad either

Are you running games at a quality fitting your gfx card? like medium-high?

Even if you run them in safe mode some thing. But they run way over 60fps without it enabled so I don't really care too much . But then games like dirt 3, battlefield 3 and such run fine with it enabled

leave it at that I will.

Sorry all I read was you have stutter playing games. Whats lucid viru? I use avast if that is an AV

StarBound wrote:Sorry all I read was you have stutter playing games. Whats lucid viru? I use avast if that is an AV

Its what all z77 based motherboard(H77 too I think) have. Basically allows you to use the cpu's integrated graphics together with your discrete card, supposedly increases frame rates by 30%-70%.....not so sure about this

Absolutely not. The only thing that works like that is the AMD FM chips with hybrid xfire. I think its suppose to be use the onboard or rather on chip gfx for a lower power consumption.

So now that you disabled everything is running smoother than smoother?

No. it claims to increase frame rates. But does nothing of the sort from what i can see, but yep everything runs a bit smoother than before with it turned off

Well this is a smoothing tactic I use. And by that I mean smoothen. Force tripple buffer and vsync. But remember my spec.