New build for Crysis/EP2

in answer to the 650i critic......... it doesnt have SLi hence the £58 price tag

but overall the giga board is better

i hit 2.8ghz easily without worrying about anything on the stock cooler so getting that E2180 up shouldnt be a problem :) without any messing
 
yeah the stock cooler is fine for overclocking the wee little cpu. Sorry i missed it didn't have sli. But i still stand by my points that they are unreliable and many have been rmaed and dont overclock to well compared to P35s.
 
I've ordered my parts now. The final spec was;

finaljr2.jpg


didn't bother with a PSU. I'll try what I have & by a new one of it doesn't cut the mustard.
 
Got my new kit in the post yesterday. gfx card was different to the one in the pic but I think the one I have is better (hasn't got one of those monstrous coolers on it!) I'll be attempting my new build on the morrow. Wish me luck ....... because it's only the second build I've ever done & I had help the first time!!
 
Good luck :)

You'll be fine with an x1950 for ep2. I've just finished it on an x1900xtx, and the only thing letting it down was the weird Source sound stutter (which went away eventually). Looked good, played nice, etc.

Only downside is you'll probably spend longer building the rig than you will using it to play ep2, it's very short :/

abc
 
ALienBC said:
Good luck :)

You'll be fine with an x1950 for ep2. I've just finished it on an x1900xtx, and the only thing letting it down was the weird Source sound stutter (which went away eventually). Looked good, played nice, etc.

Only downside is you'll probably spend longer building the rig than you will using it to play ep2, it's very short :/
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Actually I've already struggled through it. But I played it mostly in a window with the settings quite low! HL2 runs very well on my rig as does EP1. But things just fall over in EP2. Not sure why other than a couple of additional lighting FX.

I was originally hoping to upgrade before EP2 came out but in the end I decided to wait & see how it played. It was rubbish so I ordered my new parts. At least I'll be more up to date now. As it is I'm limited with AGP gfx card choices & clearly any new grahically intensive titles are just going bring my current system to it's knees!

As for the st-st-stutter bug in HL2 - I was effected with that badly on my current rig. It was poor performance in HL2 that prompted me to upgrade the last time! But even after buying my current rig & HL2 mostly running very smoothly I still had instances is of extreme st-st-stutter!! It has to be said that even though Source is a great engine it doesn't seem to be very well written. It's far from the most polished engine & every time they bolt something new onto it you get a massive performance hit. The best thing Source has going for it is the physics engine.
 
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Yay!! Here I am on the other side of my new build :) Everything seems cool at the moment. Just about to fire up HL2 EP2 to see how it runs now. The actual build was quite straightforward ..... apart from a little hick-up fitting the heatsink/cooler! Should have read the instructions properly - I was pushing pins down ....... and then twisting!! Found out later that there was no need to twist! Everything else was very straightforward. Not much to do in the BIOS. Everything pretty much set itself up. Nice & simple.

Was a little dissapointed to find out the mobo only had 1 IDE connector as I had 1 SATA & 1 IDE internal HD's as well as 2 disk drives. Looks like I'll have to loose the IDE & replace it with another SATA for back up. Bought time I suppose. Was also slightly dissapointed to fin out that the mobo had no Firewire ports either. I'll have to buy a firewire PCI card so I can transfer my DV movies to the HD.


Anyway thanks for everyone's help & advice in this thread. It's been hugely helpful.

Cheers ;)
db
 
Dogboy73 said:
As for the st-st-stutter bug in HL2 - I was effected with that badly on my current rig. It was poor performance in HL2 that prompted me to upgrade the last time! But even after buying my current rig & HL2 mostly running very smoothly I still had instances is of extreme st-st-stutter!! It has to be said that even though Source is a great engine it doesn't seem to be very well written. It's far from the most polished engine & every time they bolt something new onto it you get a massive performance hit. The best thing Source has going for it is the physics engine.
Click to expand...


I still haven't found the real source (er, heh) of the stutterbug. Valve support say it happens when you run out of paging memory, but I've been through my processes and monitored the page size, and it never exceeds what they say should be maximum (150mb). With ep2, TF2 and Portal, each game has locked the PC completely following the stutter... and then, gradually and with no apparent pattern, stopped doing it entirely. I take a very simplistic view of the problem: it's a sound bug, I'm using onboard sound, and maybe it'll go away if I bother upgrading to a dedicated sound card (or if Valve ever work out how to stop the bug in the first place). I also had a total lock-up with UT3 demo the other day - first time it's ever happened on a non-Source engine.

Anyway, congrats on the new build :)
abc
 
The stutter bug is a weird one. Doesn't seem to be performance related because it has effected people that have mamouth system that otherwise run the game perfectly.

There was a view, after HL2 was released, that the stutter bug had something to do with the sound as it's usually worst on the parts where charcters speak a lot e.g. The G-man's speach at the beginning & Breen's speach later on in the game. I wouldn't be thinking onboard sound though - I've always had an audio/sound card because I also use my PC for music & the stutter bug has always effected me.

It will be interesting to see if the stutter bug rears its ugly head on my new system. It was a problem on my previous system. As for the one before that ...... forget it!
 
Dogboy73 said:
The stutter bug is a weird one. Doesn't seem to be performance related because it has effected people that have mamouth system that otherwise run the game perfectly.

There was a view, after HL2 was released, that the stutter bug had something to do with the sound as it's usually worst on the parts where charcters speak a lot e.g. The G-man's speach at the beginning & Breen's speach later on in the game. I wouldn't be thinking onboard sound though - I've always had an audio/sound card because I also use my PC for music & the stutter bug has always effected me.

It will be interesting to see if the stutter bug rears its ugly head on my new system. It was a problem on my previous system. As for the one before that ...... forget it!
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on the first computer i played HL2 on, i was using onboard sound and didn't have the stutter problem during speech, but i would get it VERY badly during the actual game, requiring a restart. in the end it turned out that it was because of IMAT (Intel-Memory-Accelleration-Technology) which caused the mem and CPU to run a tiny bit faster (i think it was 48MHz on the CPU)

i turned that off and my problems were gone.

on my new computer, i've not had any stutter problems in half life two at all. (Q6600, 4GB, 8800GTX, onboard sound...)
 
Personally I'd got for the DS3P motherboard, it has more features for about the same price as the DS3R (except for DD3 support which the DS3P lacks.) However, IMHO you don't need DDR3 support yet and it's a bit of a moot issue as you can't use DDR2 and DD3 together, so you'd have to get rid of your DDR2 to make use of the boards DDR3. At that time you'll be more likely to just get a new board again IMO. And as I say you have for example e-Sata ports on the DS3P which are lacking on the DS3R etc. Also some people have been having hassles with specifically the DS3R boards, while the DS3P is a proven performer.
 
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Does the DS3P mobo support Firewire? Bit dissapointed that the DS3R doesn't as I do use Firewire for my DV cam. I'll have to buy a PCI Firewire card now. They are dirt cheap though. Can't use my old IDE drive either as there is only 1 IDE port & that's being used by the CD & DVD burner. I'll buy a replacement SATA.
 
Just found a page with the Crysis system requirements (minimum & recommended). According to this I should be okay for Crysis with my new build. Won't be able to run things at full pelt obviously but it should certainly handle things okay.

http://www.crysis-online.com/Information/System Requirements/


Not much of a benchmark these days I know but I ran the Counter Strike Source stress test earlier. My previous system gave me average of 55fps. The new one gives 145fps!! I'm happy with that ;) TF2, Portal & EP2 are also now running sweet. It's a big step up from my old system for sure.

Speaking of my old system. If I build it back up again would it be worth anything? Is it worth trying to sell it on e-bay? (MSI K8N Neo2 mobo, AMD Winchester 3000 CPU (1.8GHz), 1GB PC3200 400MHz RAM, GForce 6800LE). I'd have to buy a case, PSU, hard drive & optical drive to complete the system.
 
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Dogboy73 said:
Speaking of my old system. If I build it back up again would it be worth anything? Is it worth trying to sell it on e-bay? (MSI K8N Neo2 mobo, AMD Winchester 3000 CPU (1.8GHz), 1GB PC3200 400MHz RAM, GForce 6800LE). I'd have to buy a case, PSU, hard drive & optical drive to complete the system.
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your best bet is probably to sell them separately or as a bundle (cpu, mobo and ram) have a wee look and see what those components are actually selling for and then decide on that
 
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