F@H **Official** SPAM Thread Episode II (5-22-2012)

[Nude_Lewd_Man]

Designed our next BBQ last night....need 256 bricks...












Also, booked almost everything for our hols...only things left to do are to sort transfers over in Turkey, pack, and go....

[Carld]

I got used to using the new version 7 client at least. It still seems buggy, but for 1 WU a day, I'm fine with what it does.

[Carld]

I can't believe you counted the bricks...

[ShyguyXPC]

getting a very satisfying 50-60 fps at 1920x1080 on my i7 920/GTX 470 hardware.

I have it initially set for all high settings, but in game I jacked everything up to max settings.

occasionally dips down to 40fps, unless I'm recording with FRAPS, which is set to record at 50fps, but drops the game down to 30 when recording.

but so far liking the lighting effects, spell effects and some other stuff. The new interface for spells and other things is a real pain in the ass, obviously was designed for Gimped Console Players.

They could of easily tweaked and fixed it for PC users, but I'm guessing BethSoft was just too lazy to do a little more work for the Market that put them on the map.

Irritating to find out you actually have to start a new game before you can even do any Key configs.

but so far so good.

Though don't know if its A Steam thing or what, but I was about to shoot a Bear in the Caverns in the beginning of the game and then the game just flashed and I was at desktop with Steam Syncing the Fracking Game.

It shut the game down to sync it while I was in the middle of playing, the Syncing took less than 45 seconds to do... why it needed to sync it after it just installed and updated is beyond me, but I hope this isn't a continuing issue, otherwise I won't be playing it much.

[Nude_Lewd_Man]

I can't believe you counted the bricks...

Didn't count the bricks, I calculated them...after all, if I'm going to need to buy them, then I'll need to know how many to get.....

I'm also liking that it is a binary number.....







With regards to our holibobs....


Hoteloogle.com - Sea Life Resort Hotel Antalya - YouTube

[SoloCamo]

But, Green for Nvidia and Blue for Intel. Was mainly the reason why. Otherwise I could of just went with 2 non LED 140mm fans instead. oddly, that would of cost me more than what I paid for the LED Xigmateks though LOL.

Ha, I had the exact same train of thought, except for one thing.... I'm no fashion designer but for the life of me I refuse to have a Christmas case with one red 120mm and one green one for AMD & Nvidia!

Glad to see Skyrim is working out well for you though man, I applaud Bethesda for actually making it a bit easier to run this time around, besides the crappy CPU bottlenecks in some area (cough cough white run / markoth ) .

Luckily neither of our systems have trouble running it maxed though.

[ShyguyXPC]

yeah, hopefully that syncing thing doesn't get to be too frequent, otherwise it will be very frustrating.

Right now, the thing in game I find annoying the most is the "navigating" for the constellations for the Spells.. WTF were they thinking?

I feel like I'm playing Mass Effect and trying to select a Destination for the Normandy.

the menu's for selecting stuff like Chests and loot on bodies is a pain as well, you can select take or take all, but you can just select with mouse, how ever you have to hit escape to leave the menu, they couldn't of just added another button option to exit the menu?

I do like the Dual Spell casting though, was armed with the first Flame and Spark spells using god mode so I had unlimited Magicka, and that was interesting to say the least... Felt like I was some sort of bastardized Street Fighter Dark Jedi in the land of Skyrim shooting flames out of one hand and lightning out the other LOL.

also helps when your playing as a Khajiit, made mine look almost all black jaquar looking, except for some red on his nose, jaw and the facial hair, had a hard time selecting the eye's as there were a few I liked.

but the texture, image and lighting quality was Far superior to Oblivion for sure. Going from this back to that feels like going from a CG Cartoon back to an old Disney Cartoon LOL.

when the game started out, I was like, Ahhhh, this looks like crap, with the fog and what not. then as they got down the mountain and out of the fog and snow and crap, the lighting got far better and scenery much more pleasant, and that is how the HDR SHOULD have been done in Oblivion, but they messed that up in that game.

anyways, the newer system shouldn't have any troubles running the game at max then.

heck, should even run a bit better than the older one.

anyways, I think my cables got here today, so should see about getting those installed in the new case and at least get the new system updated, and some stuff installed and transferred on it.

[ShyguyXPC]

cables got here, and DAMN, I do HIGHLY recommend these Akasa ProSlim SATA Cables.

They're not much narrower than standard SATA, about 2/3's the width but they are a tad thinner, and MUCH MUCH more flexible than regular SATA cables,

The connectors are also fairly easy to handle since the wires going into them are so small, though a bit tough plugging into Mobo with stacked ports and tons of stuff already connected inside. But their the best SATA cables I've ever used.


still have 2 left over, I decided to just plug the standard SATA from the HDD Dock on the case into the ports, rather than use an extension on it and add to more cable clutter on the back side.


But the system, hardware wise is FULLY Completed. fans and everything wired up, boots up fine, runs with a bit more noise than before, but thats due to the extra Case fans running in it now, one in bottom and the side panel fan working,

PSU also seems to be a bit louder than the 520W Antec I had in, but its an 850W unit and to be expected.

still much quieter than the older system.

its still a heavy case completed, but much lighter than the older one, by a good 20 pounds at least.


had a bit of a snag or snafu, but after some inspection it was the power button and Power led, apparently EVGA and Coolermaster use different colors... Red and Orange, one uses Orange for Power LED, and Red for Power Switch, the other is swapped, I had the cables color coded to the mobo colors, and when connected to the cases cables, those two were swapped. so I just swapped them on the FP Header and it fires up fine now.

Booted into windows, formatted the 750GB and 1.5TB Drives, and now all set to do some updates on Windows, and transfer data and files from old system to new one, after some additional file back up stuff is done on the old.

should be able to start on my bro's PC sometime this weekend.

[ShyguyXPC]

Um.... Wow...

Just put in 5+ hours of Skyrim... Got sucked in again with another Elder Scrolls game I guess LOL.

I am running the game completely Maxed out at 1080p, everything cranked to max settings and I'm still getting 40-60fps on average.

I'm just in awe with some of the special effects, the snow and wind in the mountains, water effects, spell casting effects, light shining through forest on ground.

I was having fun traipsing through the open Tundra Prairie like area in the early part of the game, hunting Elk with my bow.

I already completed Bleak whatchamacallit cave or whatever, with the Golden Claw quest, so picked up some ancient Nord weapons.

But I ran across some Mammoths on the plains... and DAMN, if I didn't know any better, I'd swear my character was jacked up on Skooma running for cover in an old ruined guard tower...

I attacked them from far, but once they were alerted to my presence, all 3 started to stampede towards me, and needless to say I was running my ass off to cover...

hell I had a couple wolves on my tail as well, but I think they got trampled.

took forever to take the one mammoth down, the other 2 disappeared.

spells didn't do squat to it, no matter what ones I tried, Arrows barely scratched it.

I even had 3 or 4 Guards attacking it, I had to go in up close with 2 Swords and do some melee...

even then it took forever to take it down...


Note to self, STAY THE F*CK AWAY FROM THE MAMMOTHS!!!!



but I was having fun earlier swimming in the river falling down stream over waterfalls and catching Salmon.

Also catching Butterflies, Bee's, and other stuff.

I'm just impressed with everything you can do in the game, operate the saw mill, chop wood and collect for weapon upgrades.

they finally found some uses for useless items from Oblivion, you can now use Pick Axes to mine for ores, and various other things.

Have a feeling I'll be playing this one much more and for quite some time longer than Oblivion.

If only they could do some total Conversions of Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind and Oblivion with this game engine and merge them into one game, or even separate games, with many of the capabilities in this one...

[ShyguyXPC]

was impressed with this kill shot, me and this dude were at a mexican standoff so to speak, he was alerted to me, and drew his weapons, I had mine out, and he kept warning me to back off...

I finally said to hell with it, released and took him out in one shot. He literally ate the arrow.

30 seconds later his 2 companions were down, one with a Bow, me and that one were back and forth ducking and dodging each others bow shots LOL.


The final Kill shot on that last one, was 2 grazing shots, and a 3rd to the head, but even if that didn't kill her, the fact she fell over the ledge and dropped 3 or so stories down would of finished her for sure LOL.

[SoloCamo]

I see you've been bitten by the bug, I've got well over 70 hours into at this point... and I have not even started the main quest LOL.

Perhaps I missed it in your post, but did you make sure to download the high res texture pack? It makes a world of difference, though it will take a hit on the gpu.

I've got my GTX480 overclocked pretty well now considering its the stock reference design cooler.

With the layout of my V3 case I've got a 120mm slim fan pushing cool air on the heatpipes of it too.

Went from 700mhz core on the dot to 800mhz core stable.

Also, bumped my memory up from 924mhz to 1ghz to give me a nice bandwidth jump from 177gb/s to 192gb/s aka rivaling the stock gtx580's 192gb/s so i'm ok on the bandwidth front.

My core clock is also faster than the 580's.

Unfortunately the 580 does have more shaders and will still be the faster card, but now not by much at all.

I'm satisfied that I'm now without a doubt beating a gtx570, especially at high res with my extra memory 1.5gb vs 1.2gb where as at stock speed the 570, in SOME games slightly edged out my stock 480, and by edge I mean 1-2fps at most.

PSU knock on wood has been rock solid thus far.

Now you are probably wondering.... DAMMNNN that thing must be running hot - well it's ok even overclocked, but it also greatly helps on top of keeping my houses's central air at 75, that I have a window ac in my room at full blast almost 24/7 . My room is probably about 65* when it's a nice and toasty 95 out right now here in Florida.

I'm happy now until I see the electric bill

It was pretty funny though, I had myself and the GF freaking the f out because I thought the wiring in my wall was heating up and about to cause a fire. And it was the wiring through the wall near my bed.

Know what the cause was? My gtx480's exhaust after hours of GTA IV on the pc, the air was flowing in almost a jetstream alongside the wall and heating up under the ac unit.... I touched the back of the exhaust port and screamed more curses than I thought I knew haha.

Full load card never really get's past 78*c even overclocked so I don't know why everyone complains so much. The GTX480 uses a whopping 6 more watts than the GTX580 and no one seems to complain about them..

____

OFF TOPIC (was there truly ever a topic in the first place?):

I picked up some glow in the dark paint on clearance.... any cool ideas to do with it?

[Nude_Lewd_Man]

Paint something that is usually seen when it's dark....??

[ShyguyXPC]

I see you've been bitten by the bug, I've got well over 70 hours into at this point... and I have not even started the main quest LOL.

Perhaps I missed it in your post, but did you make sure to download the high res texture pack? It makes a world of difference, though it will take a hit on the gpu.

I've got my GTX480 overclocked pretty well now considering its the stock reference design cooler.

With the layout of my V3 case I've got a 120mm slim fan pushing cool air on the heatpipes of it too.

Went from 700mhz core on the dot to 800mhz core stable.

Also, bumped my memory up from 924mhz to 1ghz to give me a nice bandwidth jump from 177gb/s to 192gb/s aka rivaling the stock gtx580's 192gb/s so i'm ok on the bandwidth front.

My core clock is also faster than the 580's.

Unfortunately the 580 does have more shaders and will still be the faster card, but now not by much at all.

I'm satisfied that I'm now without a doubt beating a gtx570, especially at high res with my extra memory 1.5gb vs 1.2gb where as at stock speed the 570, in SOME games slightly edged out my stock 480, and by edge I mean 1-2fps at most.

PSU knock on wood has been rock solid thus far.

Now you are probably wondering.... DAMMNNN that thing must be running hot - well it's ok even overclocked, but it also greatly helps on top of keeping my houses's central air at 75, that I have a window ac in my room at full blast almost 24/7 . My room is probably about 65* when it's a nice and toasty 95 out right now here in Florida.

I'm happy now until I see the electric bill

It was pretty funny though, I had myself and the GF freaking the f out because I thought the wiring in my wall was heating up and about to cause a fire. And it was the wiring through the wall near my bed.

Know what the cause was? My gtx480's exhaust after hours of GTA IV on the pc, the air was flowing in almost a jetstream alongside the wall and heating up under the ac unit.... I touched the back of the exhaust port and screamed more curses than I thought I knew haha.

Full load card never really get's past 78*c even overclocked so I don't know why everyone complains so much. The GTX480 uses a whopping 6 more watts than the GTX580 and no one seems to complain about them..

____

OFF TOPIC (was there truly ever a topic in the first place?):

I picked up some glow in the dark paint on clearance.... any cool ideas to do with it?

Paint something that is usually seen when it's dark....??

I'm not messing with any addons until its installed on the new rig, I was trying it out on the older one to get an idea of how much of a boost I'll have on the new.

And to see if it will run well enough for my brother, as he wants to get skyrim on the PC as well.


I'm starting to wonder if V-sync is enabled for the game by default, seems my FPS caps out at 60fps, but don't remember seeing an option for it anywhere in games settings, may have to dig into the config files or disable via Nvidia control panel.

but yeah, textures for most part are fine for me as is, though some indoor textures are a bit plain looking, better than oblivion, but not as good as they should be compared to rest of the game.



As to paint, I still got a 99% full can of UV Red Paint from years ago, sprays on almost invisible, but with UV light, glows red.

[Nude_Lewd_Man]

Has G+ really been dead for a week, or is it playing up...?

Seriously, the last message in my feed (or whatever it is called) was from the 15th.....!!


I know that it was bugging me to give more info about me and schtuffs, but I managed to get past that without adding much/any more................but it hasn't updated....

[ShyguyXPC]

I haven't been on it in a week, though I did see you Plus'd one of my comments, but I have more people I'm following than I interact with and sharing than anything, aside from you and a few others I know, most of the people I know who are online are still on FB.

But I just haven't been on G+ in the last week, Just logged in and seems fine.

But I know what you mean about more info, they keep wanting me to add a Phone Number and/or Mobile Number, which I keep denying and log in anyways.

[ShyguyXPC]

Finally got fed up with this POS Logitech Slim keyboard we have connected to my moms Netbook...

in low light I have a hard time seeing what keys are what, the awkward arrangement of keys, slightly smaller keys, and then the Home/End/Page Up/Page Down keys are arranges in a 2x3 grid instead of 3x2 grid, which makes for a pain in the ass hunting for keys in dark and hitting wrong keys.

So I finally broke down and shelled out another $48 for a 2nd Microsoft Sidewinder X4 like I already have with the Back lit LED keys.

Its larger, and will take up nearly the entire keyboard shelf on this desk, but I can have the first few inches on left side hang off desk if needed, or just use mouse on desktop, since we now have the LCD display instead of the old CRT, however my mom always manages to find space to stack crap on the desk.

but will at least have larger keys, easy to see Red Backlit keys, and some other handy keys like volume controls instead of using the Netbooks Fn Keys (yes, Pun intended ).

I only spent like $30 or so on the first one last year, but I finally snapped tonight typing a response on FB, and I hit some damned combination of keys on this thing and wiped the post clean and then closed the browser window.

so in 3 days or so (middle of next week) will have a 2nd X4 Keyboard to use on the netbook, and if I ever get around to getting the Mini ITX PC all put together, used out here as well.

[SoloCamo]

Well I decided to do the inside wall of my file serve pc with the UV paint, and it looks pretty cool when the pc is on since I'm running two cold cathode black lights in there, so it lights up a nice green. Case isn't tacky though since you can only see the lights through the fan grills anyways.

Now I made a move most would call an unnecessary e-penis enlargement (LOL) and ordered another 8gb of DDR3-1866 bringing me up to 16gb

The reason?


-I'm going to be getting into video editing

-I'm starting back up with my CS4 / photoshop

-Ram is dirt cheap at the moment

-I plan to keep this PC a while and made the mistake on my last pc of running with "more than enough ram" once and ended up wanting to buy more but the prices were crazy

I also learned this lesson on hard drives - only bought a small 200gb sata drive a few years back and said prices are so cheap I will get more when I need it... low and behold the flooding... Now I had to overpay for both my external WD 2tb and my current internal 500gb Barracuda.

[SoloCamo]

Newegg (finally!!) shipped the package... so much for paying an extra 3 bucks for rush ordering... Holiday or not I expected it to leave earlier than 5pm est considering its the 3 day shipping.. Bui I digress.

Btw, any of you have the urge to add cheap products on your order that have free 3 day shipping to make the entire order free 3 day? If I can do it for close or under the cost of shipping I always get some extra crap.

In this case I got some basic spare 120mm fans and fan grills

[ShyguyXPC]

NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 660 expected in July or August, based on GK106 architecture :: TweakTown USA Edition

God I hope they are far off on that pricing if this can be believed.

still no word yet on the 660 Ti variant, though some are saying end of the summer...

if that is the case I may just swing a 2nd 560 Ti for now and be done with it.

if the 660 will be able to be had for around $250 or less I might consider one, but if its going to be 300 or more, forget about it, I'd rather drop the cash on a couple Radeon 7850's or 7870's.

this latest generation of Nvidia cards has been botched on releases for too long, panning out the releases of various cards at too long an interval.

Its really got me leaning towards Team Red.

Though if I can get some 500 series for cheap I will. I'm almost debating dropping some cash for a 570, sell the the 560 Ti, and then pick up a 2nd 570 later in the year.

so many decisions right now.

though I'm really wanting to get something with 1.5GB or more of Video memory if I can. with at least the performance level of the 560 Ti or 570 range cards.


Reading some comments on OCN about it too:

[Vr-zone] NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 is the Fifth GK104 Board, Comes Out for Computex 2012?

just don't know what to make of this gen of cards really.

I'm mainly wanting to gear up for ArmA 3 releasing later this year to have as much CPU and GPU power as possible to have a smooth gaming experience.

right now what I have for most other games I play is more than enough, though I could stand to see near 100fps in Skyrim LOL...

just wish Higher Capacity DDR3 was cheaper in price, I'd be willing to load up on 24GB of 1600MHz DDR3, and upgrade Win7 Home to Pro to use all of that.

heck I'm thinking 12GB (and additional 6GB) soon.

I've also noticed many 120GB range SSD's finally coming down in price to the $100 mark, Corsair has they 120GB Force GT series drive on newegg for just over that, and I have seen one of the "lesser" Mushkin 120GB SSD's for around the same price as well.

[SoloCamo]

I've got to agree, that pricing is nuts. I would definitely not pay $350 for a vanilla 660, especially now with the prices of 570's and 580's dropping.

Don't get me wrong, the efficiency of these 6 series power requirements is amazing, but is it enough to justify the price tag? I'd say that depends on how old your rig is now.

Two 560ti's in SLI is quite a formiddable setup, however as you've noted 1gb of Vram is starting to show it's "age" so to speak.

___

Additional 8gb of RAM, and boy oh boy it's a biatch to get this stuff stable with all 4 slots full., Wishing I dropped the cash on 2x 8gb sticks initially at this point.

Apparently this is a known thing however, and getting all 4 slots stable at DDR3-1866 is not really feasible on the platform without luck and tons of volts. Not worth it.

Runs rock solid at 1600 speeds with all 4 sticks and a bit of .5 on the volts for the mem bringing it up to 1.55v.

Honestly if I were you i'd jump on the ram prices while they are low.