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Loading ...The Watercooling Matrix
combatus
Many Custom PC, CPCFF and WCuk forum users know that I’ve been working on a website called The Watercooling Matrix for a couple of months now although in the last month I’ve been snowed under with other things and part migrated to Vista so it has been neglected a little! The basic idea behind the site is a matrix or database of information which is displayed in a grid that allows you to view systems that have been submitted with certain water-cooling configurations.
The idea is you might want to use a certain size radiator or a certain case but don’t know if one will fit in the other. Using the Matrix you can click on a certain radiator size, for example 360mm and see all systems that have used that size. Likewise you can click on a certain case and see all systems built using that case. All systems are water-cooled obviously so you’ll be able to see lots of different ways people have come up with to water-cool their case.
The Matrix also shows the number of combinations of a specific case and radiator size for example a Silverstone TJ-07 with a 360mm radiator and this too you are able to select to see all TJ-07’s with a 360mm rad. ? Well click on over to www.watercoolingmatrix.net and let me know your thoughts. If you have a water-cooled PC then feel free to submit it. You’ll get featured on the front page!
I’m trying to keep the site as simple as possible partly as water-cooling can be a complicated subject but also because my own web design skills are fairly limited so please excuse the fact it’s not the most sexy site out there! Who knows maybe a nice big fancy enthusiast site will incorporate it into their website one day and make it look nice! However I am keeping it up to date with the latest water-cooling news and reviews and adding new features like a radiator dimensions table so it’s worth checking out every now and then. Visitor wise it’s been going very well considering I’m not advertising per-say. Watercooling UK were kind enough to exchange banners (thanks Rob) and I am of course affiliated massively but unofficially with Custom PC! So I’m getting quite a few hits through this and various other places which have doubled every month since the site went live to nearly 2000 unique hits in April!
Sound good? Well click on over to www.watercoolingmatrix.net and let me know your thoughts. If you have a water-cooled PC then feel free to submit it. You’ll get featured on the front page! I’d like to give special thanks to Marcus and Rob of WCUK, Mark Buckley (mad4maxin), LukeSullivan (D-Cyph3r), Andrew Shapter (OneEyeUK), Stuart Llewellyn (stuartpengs), WoodSpoon and GlowingBulb who all helped very early on with the site and gave feedback and/or submitted their own systems. Thanks must finally go to CPC for these excellent Blogs, Plogs and Forums and of course THE magazine!
regards to all
Antony [Combatus]
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Loading ...Mixing Crossfire and water
combatus
Mixing Crossfire
I came accross a rather interesting article over at Legit Reviews which shows that as of the last couple of Catalyst releases (certainly after Cat 8.1) it is now possible to mix certain cards in Crossfire. Namely, as per the review, ATI’s latest mid range cards, the 3850 and 3870. With the introduction of Crossfire X you may even be able to mix even more cards - say a 3870X2 and a 3850 etc etc. Very interesting stuff and the performance is pretty good too, especially with Antialiasing enabled - frame rates are doubled over your average 3850 in games like COD4. Whether it’s worth forking out for two cards at once is another matter - it’s usually more sensible financially to sell your old card and get a newer faster single card. But in my case, it was cheaper to get a 3870 and go Crossfire than to say, sell my 3850 and opt for something like an 8800GTS 512MB. Seeing as both setups can’t run Crysis but can cope with anything else , 3850 owners with Crossfire motherboards may want to consider a 3870, especially if new cards like the 3870X2 and 9800GX2 can’t run Crysis at your monitors native resolution on high settings.
The Decision…
With next gen graphics cards seemingly being delayed all over the auction and with ATI’s 3870X2 not puting a massively convincing arguement for spending £270 odd quid, I decided I needed to do something about my lonely 3850 which suffers badly at 1680×1050 when enabling AA. I had first thought about getting a cheap 8800GTX or 8800GTS, but both were close to or more than £200, certainly in the case of the GTX. However after reading the review I was warming to Crossfire seeing that it would give similar if not better performance to the latest cards from Nivida but would cost me less - and when I found a 3870 for less than £120 in my local PC shop I grabbed it.
Crossfire miss-fire?
Now, for those who have read my forum post, I had problems!!! the 3870 branded as “Triplex” was far shorter than my Sapphire 3850 - a bit odd and it looked like it was missing a whole row of voltage regulators! . It also didn’t come with a Crossfire bridge connector - not a big problem as my Sapphire did but many people use two and you need to for high resolutions.
I could enable Crossfire and got a stonking 15100 points in 3D Mark 06 at stock settings - even with my 3850 clocked as high as it would go I could only just about crack the 10,000 mark. I couldn’t compare the system to anyone elses on 3Dmark as apparently I’m the ONLY person with this setup! he he!!! This could be the only watercooled 3870/3850 setup in the world!!!
However I was unable to overclock the cards. In Catalyst Control Centre the sliders would move but on testing or running Autotune, the frequencies would return to default. I tried reverting to Catalyst 8.1 but still no joy. In the end I decided to take the card back and low and behold my retailer had no idea the Triplex cards didn’t come with a Crossfire connector. While he was shouting down the phone at their supplier I was given a refund and decided to give a Sapphire 3870 a go - maybe running the same vendor would do the trick. I attached the second Crossfire connector as well and low and behold I can now overclock each card seperately!!! Woo hoo!
Just add water…
Now, something that has bugged me when overclocking my 3850 is that the cooler can’t handle much heat. In fact I’ve come out of games suffering from artifacts even though CCC overdrive passed the overclock, to find the card running in excess of 70′C!!!! I used Rivatuner to create a fan profile to manually raise the fan speed but this didn’t always kick in and to run the fan at 60% speed which was needed to keep the thing cool was too noisy for my liking.
So too much noise and heat and Combatus is involved - you guessed it! Watercooling! Two EK Acetalfull cover blocks were soon at my door.
It won’t fit!!!!
I started by removing the HSF from each GPU which was fairly easy. I fitted the 3870 waterblock but when I went to install the block on the 3850 —Horror!!!! It fouled one of the capacitors!!!! No matter how much I squeezed the block in, the holes for the mounting screws wouldn’t line up.
There was only one thing for it. Out came Mr Dremmel and a circular sanding block and I made a small groove in the copper so the Capacitor could fit recessed into it without actually touching the block. Not something you should have to do…
On the 3870 for some reason this capacitor is absent but with the block installed you can clearly see how much it fouls the capacitor placement.
The block now fits fine and also cools the voltage regulators but I’ll be on the blower to EK if they don’t know already! Without a dremmel this could render many blocks useless.
This is the first time I’ve installed dual card watercooling. Not for the faint hearted! I ended up with with the following loop:
Pump>GPU1>GPU2>RAD>CPU>RAD>Chipset/RAM>Reservoir
Amazingly the flow rate didn’t appear to be effected at all (EK blocks are fairly low restriction) and my CPU temp has only gone up a few degrees, although my system was designed around a CPU,GPU,Chipset/RAM to begin with - my watercooled X1900 died last year and the 3850 has been aircooled since then so there has been plenty of redundancy. I am probably going to re-hash the plumbing at some point, for cosmetic reasons if anything - it’s all over the place!
Does look nice though….
Overclocking…
So, now that overclocking is enabled and the cards are watercooled and running at a nice cool 30′C idle (down from 50+!) it’s time to try a little clocking. I started by overclocking the 3850 to a modest 710Mhz/1020mhz up from 669mhz/829mhz. This gave me an extra 400 points in 3dmark 06 - 15498 and I know it can go a bit further too. Overclocking the 3870 was a different matter. The card refused to run 3Dmark 06 at anything other than default speeds. I’m sure the card can be clocked more than this but it’s probably because it’s working as the main card in the setup - bit of a shame but future drivers may sort this and it’s amazing you can use the two cards together anyway!!!
So if you’re thinking of mixing Crossfire, firstly avoid the cheap Triplex cards, secondly try to use cards from the same vendor ie Sapphire. It’s also worth using both Crossfire connectors too!
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Multicore gaming is here - so Dual or Quad?
combatus
Pretty much as long as multi-CPU’s have been around, there has been the overwhelming argument that most every-day applications simply didn’t benefit from more than one core. Multitasking and encoding were pretty much the only non-benchmark situations that you might actually see noticable benefits.
Then all of a sudden games developers have taken note and we are seeing real performance improvements over single core CPUs. Not only this but having four rather than two cores also makes a difference, especially in multithreaded games like Unreal Tournament 3 and Crysis. In the CPC CPU megatest (Issue53 Feb) quad-cores were ahead by similarly clocked dual-cores by noticable margins.
Crysis for example had a minimum frame rate 15% higher with a Q6600 than with an E6600. UT3 actively uses two or more cores “There is a primary thread for the gameplay and a second one for rendering. On systems with more than two cores we run additional threads to speed up various calculation tasks, including physics and data decompression. So the overall performance benefits greatly from a quad-core processor.” (EPIC’S Tim Sweeney ) and the difference is even more pronounced - with the resolution lowered to 1024×768 to eliminate GPU limitations, Anandtech found that frame rates were boosted from 154FPS to 186FPS simply by making the move from two to four cores. Read the full article here
What this means is that the bandwagon is definitely on the move as far as multi-core gaming is concerned. While benefits from quad cores at the moment are relatively small compared to the move from a single core, the increase is there nonetheless and this is important for two reasons:
1. If you want to get the most out of your system, even with games then a quad core CPU is a worthwhile investment.
2. futureproofing should naturally include consideration for future games which may make even more use of two or more cores - so with games already making use of additional cores with extra threads for things like additional calculations, if you upgrade every year or two then a quad core could be a worthwhile investment
This makes current decisions extremely difficult though. With intels new Wolfdale 45nm dual cores on the shelves this week, and proving very overclockable, is it worth waiting for the new quad cores? There is a BIG price hike too - over £100 difference from an E8200 to a Q9450 both clocked at 2.6Ghz. What’s more the Q9450 only has an 8x multiplier, while more meaty, cheaper dual cores like the E8400 and E8500 have multipliers of 9x and 9.5x. This means that they are able to clock much higher - well over 4GHz, while the Quad will have to have a FSb of 500 a s bare minimum to even reach 4Ghz.
The new Dual cores certainly offer more bang per buck, especially as current games don’t scale convincingly with 4 cores.
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Loading ...The case for high definition on the PC
combatus
I think most of us know that there is a battle going on between HD DVD and Blu-ray. Who wins most people don’t really care, and if both formats end up succeeding in some strange and ridiculous 50/50 scenario (come on guys get it together next time with one format please, it can’t be that difficult!) we’ve now got players that can read both formats.
What has interested me however, is the need for HD over standard DVD quality which has been mainstream since the mid 90’s and on the PC since the late 90’s. DVD still looks great considering screen sizes have expanded considerably since the days that 15” and 17” CRT’s were the norm. Clearly on a 17” screen DVD quality video or 720×576 in other words looks great. However, run this video on a 24” or even 20” widescreen like I have and you begin to notice a drop in quality. This for me was highlighted quite markedly when I downloaded the HD Transformers (2007) trailer last summer in 720p (1280×720). The increase in picture quality, even audio quality was clear even on my 20” screen. I would imagine that a 24” screen running a 1080p film (1920×1080) would look fantastic. So for those who watch DVD’s on their PC at the moment and have made the move to medium/large HD compliant TFT’s for high resolution gaming, there are clear benefits for making the rest of your rig HD compliant. Luckily LG have just released a drive that can read and write to Blu-ray and read HD-DVD disks. The LG GGW-H20L is available for less than £200 and seeing as the format war is far from over, it won’t matter what way it swings, you’ll be able to use both formats and have the advantage of being able to record to large Blu-ray recordable disks which are great for backing up large amounts of data.
So despite all the hype, HD is shaping up quite nicely and the benefits can clearly be seen on screens 20 inches or larger. With many modern TFT’s and GPU’s already being HDCP compliant, the addition of a BD/HD-DVD reader for a little over £150 is a fantastic investment which will vastly improve the quality of movies you watch on your PC. So forget about that Western Digital Raptor or 4GB of ram, you’ll get much more benefit from a High Definition optical drive!.
Rated: 100% (2 votes)
Loading ...Combatus plays with an ATI 3850
combatus
It’s been a wierd old couple of months in the world of GPUs. Quite a few cards have been released, hell even ATI have managed to get a couple of cards out the door! At once! Whatever next! But while previous generations have been a case of out with the old, in with the new, what seems to be the situation now is keep the old even though the new are far better value.
I’m speaking of course of the lack of new high end cards to replace the aging 8800GTX and Ultra and the 2900XT, and the recent introduction of the new Nvidia 8800GT, GTS and 3850 +3870 cards from ATI. The GTX and Ultra still hold the roost when it comes to the fastest possible performance at high resolutions - in this respect the new GT and GTS cards are very much high mid-range than high end cards as neither quite pips the GTX or Ultra overall although the GTS is basically on par. However the 2900XT is very much on par with the new 3870 and the 3850 is left bringing up the rear but offering fantastic value.
Now the odd thing here is that the 8800GTX, Ultra and 2900XT are still around and going for crazy prices. I say crazy because these new mid range cards are firstly far cheaper, they also run cooler (especially in the case of ATI) and offer very similar performance. Take for example the ATI 3870 - its actually faster than the 2900XT in a number of benchmarks yet it costs nearly £80 less. The same is true of the 8800GTS - It easily performs on par with the GTX yet it too costs at least £50 less.
There is light at the end of the tunnel however with “propper” high end cards due out in the Spring which will hopefully tame Crysis. In the mean time, or if there is no way in hell you’re going to spent the crazy amounts of cash for these monsters just before Easter, then it’s a pretty good time to grab a bargain.
Following the death of my X1900XT, I wasn’t prepared to wait for Easter to play games again. So I decided to opt for a mid range card with the hope it might see me through till the new year. The 8800GT was tempting, but seeing as it, like every other card, cannot max out Crysis, I saw little point getting more than I needed to play UT3, COD4 and BF2. Following some recomendations on the CPC forums, I decided to go with ATIs budget offering, the HD3850. I was concerned however about the impact Antialiasing has on the frame rates - a critical flaw I feel has plagued the new DX10 offerings from ATI.
Sapphire HD3850 - at £100 it’s probably the best deal in the world of GPU’s we’ve had for a long time.
(compared to the X1900XT 512MB - less than half the height and the cooler is incredibly quiet - practically inaudiable above the rest of my system which is watercooled)
Once I had it installed I ran 3Dmark 06 to see what performance was like compared to my X1900XT. I was amazed…
ATI HD3850 Score 10294
ATI X1900XT score 7010
Clearly the new ATI cards eat 3Dmark for breakfast. But how about game performance?
Crysis
I wasn’t expecting a lot as this is a very difficult game to run well, but I was able to have several options like shaders and textures on high and still get over 30FPS while with the X1900 everything had to be set to medium for playable frame rates - this is at 1680×1050. However, AA absolutely kills the 3850 - I was using the demo and setting AA from 0x to 8x in game made the FPS drop from 35 to…..3. May as well be 0.3 really! The difference was also quite marked in the game, from what I could tell anyway as it looked like a slide show. While the 8800GT 512MB also struggles in Crysis, it would definitely be a better option.
Unreal Tournament 3
This is somewhat of a contradiction. Here I manually set AA and AF to 8x and 16x respectively and at 1680×1050 and max in game settings, the HD3850 coped well-just. The minimum FPS never dropped below 30 and in more open levels they regularly got into the 40’s which is ample. Turning AA off didn’t seem to make that much difference to the image quality either and also added to the FPS.
No AA
8xAA
Battlefield 2
Battlefield 2 was another success story. In Catalyst Control Centre 7.11 (which actually opens in a few seconds rather than a few centuries, well done ATI) I upped the AA to 8x (24x sampling), 16x AF, Mipmap Detail level to quality and enabled quality Adaptive Anti-aliasing. With default settings I got between 80-100fps again at 1680×1050. With these absolute max settings the minimun frame rate dropped to 30fps when running through smoke granades but stayed mostly between 40-60fps. The game itself looked fantastic. I noticed if I had max settings with my X1900XT that when crawling in prone through grass, the fps dropped below 20 but after a few hours play I concluded the game totally playable at these settings on the 3850.
UT3, BF2 and COD4 for that matter certainly run well on most modern systems but if you have an older card that struggles at max settings then you could do a lot worse than the HD3850 and seeing as you can pick them up for less than £100, it is an absolute steal, overclocks quite well too and is the quietest actively cooled GPU I’ve ever used. The only downside is a drop in fps when enabling AA and in Crysis this is crippling…
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Loading ...All in one devices - they’re here! Or are they?
combatus
I’ve been blabbing on about these for years and must have bored people silly on the Custom PC forums. I think I even did a poll at one point - didn’t go to well! Basically I’m after an all in one device. No it doesn’t transform from a Aston Martin into Jessica Alba and then into a £3k PC depending on what mood I’m in (that’s no particular order by the way but of course the PC would win every time!……yeah right!) Anyway, what I’m really after is something that can meet my digital needs. These are of course a multimedia phone, MP3 player, digital camera and Sat-Nav device.
Now before you all start jabbering on about seperates winning everytime, I’m not talking about replacing a digital SLR camera, I mean simply having something in your pocket that can take a good snap at 3MP or above which could happily sit on your widescreen desktop. Likewise it might not replace your MP3 player for long journeys but Sony’s Walkman phones and indeed the iPhone have sound quality pretty much the same as an iPod so this isn’t impossible.
It is essentially a device that will allow you to leave all these separate bits at home, or maybe not buy them at all in the first place. Now isn’t that sounding at least a bit tempting in terms of convenience? How about ditching your TomTom too and there is of course no need for a separate phone. You have everything you need in a single device that can fit into your pocket.
Well these devices are here - just! I got my Nokia N95 about 6 months ago and while it has the dream spec of 5MP camera, inbuilt GPS, music player and is of course a fully featured media mobile, it doesn’t do any of these things particularly well.
The camera is grainy and when looking at full size pics they appear smudged. Indoor or low light scenes are a nightmare as with most camera phones. Image quality is well below what I could produce on my 5 year old 3MP Canon Powershot. Video is good however and blown up it can nearly be compared to a propper camcorder. Presuming you have a decent sized MicroSD card then all is peachy, well nearly. This brings me on to the next below par feature which is battery life. I can sum this up using various four letter words but being polite it’s pretty damn effing bleeding sodding useless to be honest. How does 1 day standby and 2 hours talk time sound? And thats without using any features like GPS or video - if you even look at these the phone will be dead in an hour, or less, usually less.
Needless to say music isn’t much better even with high bit-rate MP3s and the default player can’t read anything over 300kbps anyway. GPS - well. It just about works in that if you have 5-10 mins to spare you can find out where you are using the inbuilt Nokia Maps system but unfortunately it’s sat nav feature leaves a lot to be desired. If travelling from Bristol to London via Inverness sounds like fun then THIS IS THE PHONE FOR YOU! If not, like me then it’s a crying shame TomTom don’t support integrated GPS units with their Mobile version of the famous SatNav program otherwise the Nokia Maps software would have been deleted quicker than you can say “i’ll get you there but twice the time”.
That said, the Maps software is pretty useful for local navigation. By that I mean you can search for a location or an address and get an immediate picture of it’s surroundings and the phone’s screen is just about big enough for this to be effective. When my TFT died a few weeks ago and Viewsonic mucked me around with the warranty and I had a weekend of BF2 and writing the “How to clean a watercooling system” article in CPC issue 51 planned, I used the phone to find www.yoyotech.co.uk who are based in London off the Tottenham Court Road to pick up a new one the same day. I also used it to give directions to one of our engineers at work who was new to the area. Pretty useful in that respect. However the drawbacks prevent me from recommending this phone to anyone who is away from a charging source for more than 24 Hours which I am as you’ll be carrying a brick around with you most of the time.
There is another device however that fits the bill and is much more substancial, quite literally as well as very promissing in being able to function more fully as an all in one device. The HTC TyTN II, otherwise known as the MDA Vario III.
What this offers over the N95 is much better battery life due to the larger battery (duh) far less fiddly, the GPS actually works well and uses third party software like Copilot but can actually use TomTom while the N95 can’t. A 3MP camera is also in the mix and from samples I’ve found online they are easily as good as the Nokia. What’s more, the phone uses Windows Mobile 6 Pro which is very versatile and has a full suit of office applications just for starters.
This is just one phone out of many that will undoubtedly come over the next few months and years and I wouldn’t underestimate the power of the “all-in-one device” especially if it actually works. Cameras will get better as will other functionalities which are already knocking on the doors of cheap cameras and MP3 players in terms of quality. Expect one in a pocket near you in the not too distant future!
Rated: 80% (1 votes)
Loading ...Pirates of the Burning Sea
combatus
I’ve been following this game for a while but the recent announcement of a release date (Jan 22nd 2008) made me look up a but more detail on the site (www.burningsea.com)
It seems very similar to pirate sims like Age of Pirates: Carribean Tales but obviously leans to the MMORPG genre and all that this entales. What amazed me is the internal economy of the game. Everything you use will have been made by another player.
Your cannon balls would have been made by another player using materials sourced from yet another player in his mines. Even the rum you drink would have been distilled by another player in his factory. It seems everything has value and can be made, sold or traded or used to cut someone’s throat! Pretty amazing stuff - not sure how it compares to other games like this but the icing on the cake is that it’s a fully fledged pirate combat simulator too with small skirmishes ranging to huge battles, both sea and land based.
The graphics from the stills I’ve seen look good too, not Crysis good but certainly enough to keep those few brain cells not selling, buying or trading or fighting happy.
If you haven’t already done so, pop over to the site or read Phil’s review for CPC here. It’s gonna be big!