You wont get a much better spec machine than what you have listed for £500

By my reckoning, you'll be able to get an A64 3200, 1gig of ram, a (decent) 420W psu, and an X800XL; and that is if you go for one of the cheaper nForce4 boards as opposed to an nForce 4 Sli board, otherwise you are pushing £550

Live for speed; extra speed, hold the rice.

Live for speed, live for skill, live for the thrill

Damn it. I knew there would be a good reason to get my license this year >_<

Don't suppose there are any confirmed coming from (or passing through) lincolnshire that I could bum a lift with?

*sigh*

One thing though, I didn't see chairs or wheels mentioned anywhere

Haha, the guy at the end made me laugh when he said "it stinks".
Geee, did he think toasting an engine would smell like roses or what

Quote from the_angry_angel :

:doh: Once again Anarchi makes me feel dumb

Hehe, don't feel bad... I've my fair share of *doh* moments too, only mine tend to be catastropic ones.... like writing a $500 backend for someone in ASP , using classes, only to find out that they are on a crappy old version of chillisoft that doesn't have classes

Now that really made me feel stupid.

ehehe, I see it, and all of y'all saying there is nothing wrong with that code sample need a clout on the beak

You are suffixing the number on to tmp_name; you don't need to. Thats the reason the first works and the rest dont

I.E. imagefile1 source location should look like
and imagefile2 source location should look like
This kinda looks like one of those errors in the Zend cert guide

Firstly, try ...
... before that code snippet to make sure that the data for file 2 is actually there.

If it is there (and you are using a PHP > 4.2.0), try changing

to
and lookup the result here ...
http://www.php.net/manual/en/features.file-upload.errors.php

That might give you more clue as to what is occuring.

There is a way to set desktop modes in the nvidia control panel, accessible through

Right Click desktop
Properties
Display tab
Advanced
Nvidia FX5200 tab (or something similar)

Then in the left pane, there should be some options (colour, display properties etc), I forget the name of the menu option you want, but it is there. You should see your two connected devices in the pane on the right, and beneath that you should have the options for setting up the display mode (Dualview, Cloned etc), and setting up which device should be primary. Try fiddling with that and see how you go.

Anytime

Asus A8N-SLI, nForce4 SLI, Socket-939 ATX, S-ATA, GbLAN, Firewire,DDR,PCI-Ex16 (€129)

AMD Athlon 64 3700+ 2.2GHz Socket 939, 1MB, BOXED w/fan (€295)

Corsair TWINX1024-3200C2 DDR-DIMM 1024MB Kit w/two matched CMX512-3200C2 DIMMs (€136)

Maxtor DiamondMax 10 200GB SATA 8MB 7200RPM NCQ (€88)

Gainward GeForce 7800GT 256MB GDDR3 PCI-Express,"U/3400PCX XP ViVo" (€396)

LG DVD±RW burner, GSA-4167RBB, 16x, Dual, Black OEM (€50.8)

Antec Sonata II Miditower, Black w/450W PSU (€129)

Logitech Cordless Desktop LX700 (€79.98)
Total = (€1,303.78)

How does that grab you?
With a simple reshuffle of expenditure, you can get a much faster gaming machine for not much more money Oh, if you really want IDE instead of SATA, the IDE version of the drive is €5 cheaper

P.S It's all quoted from komplett.ie

As a former r440 owner, I can say that the only thing they are good for is letting your rat arsed mates pan the crap out of it in NFSU drift events, stomping on the accelerator and jerking the wheel from lock to lock every couple of seconds.

There might as well be a rotary switch in it for all the accuracy and tactile feel you get out of it

Quote from Shotglass :

have you got any idea which monitors are worth buying ? ive read a lot of complains about iiyamas being blurry most of the time and you need to send them back to the support a few times until your lucky enough to get a good one and samsungs havin an annoying hum ... and since eizo doesnt manufacture crts anymore and since im reluctant to pay some 50 euros for shipping for a used monitor bought on ebay that i havent even seen prior to buying it im out of ideas which monitor i should buy

A little OT, but this rings a bell;
I have two IIyama 454 19" HM903DTBs (little brother of the 22" 514), and from the specs, they are about the best 19" monitor money can buy....
However, I've had both replaced under their 3year RTB warranty, and IIyama will be getting a call shortly to replace one of those (refurbed replacement) again!!

When the faulty one gets warm, it is blurry as feck, and if it gets really warm in the summer it phases in and out of something that I can only describe as similar to a 30px gaussian blur.
Both of them also have slight distortions in the mask on te right hand side, causing a kind of banding (not your regular 16bit bandng, its far more subtle), and also causing the screen to turn funny colours when you hit degauss. Additionally, they take forever to set up right.

All in all, not impressed, so I won't be buying another IIyama.

Actually, a whole assload of stuff is checked before GFX including some basic ram tests (addresing stuffs, which would fail if there was no ram), chipset and bus initialization.

Then the GFX is initialized, and the full ram test executes, amongst a ton of other stuff, but the board should almost definitely beep on failure of ram, GFX or no GFX.

Also, I've done a bit of digging through the A8N Sli manual; It DOES support PCI graphics cards, as long as the graphics card can either operate on a shared IRQ, or do not require an IRQ.

In addition to that, my memory served me well when I wrote my last post, because the POST speech reporter is active by default. It should tell you what is wrong, even without a CPU. As mentioned afore, try plugging a set of headphones in to the green headphone jack of the onbooard sound and see what it tells you. If it doesn't say anything, it could be a faulty motherboard.

Last edited by Anarchi-H, Wed 12 Oct 2005, 15:43.

I presume the status LED on the board is on since you have power.
Have you tried just the CPU (i.e. nothing plugged in but power and CPU)
If you can't get any beeps out of the board at all, I'd be leaning towards a faulty CPU / Mobo as every ATX motherboard I have encountered emits some kind of error code, visual (status LED) or audible.

If that gets you a beep, try the RAM, and make sure to check the manual for the recommended slot/bank if you aren't filling all of the slots.

If that 'seems' to boot, still leave the GFX out and try plugging in a pair of headphones in to the green socket on the onboard sound. I *think* it should boot without GFX, but I'm not sure, as some boards I have here do, and some don't. IIRC, default BIOS configurations for ASUS boards have the POST speech reporting switched on by default, so that might give you some extra clues if the board is getting that far.

Quote from mr Orange :

Just because I'm curious, is it also possible to join the 4 bytes into one long string of bits?

Yes, but it's treated as a 4byte integer
The reason for this is bitwise operations are performed with integers.
Once (if) the amount of cars in LFS exceeds 32, we'll need to use multiple integers if they are still transmitted bit-encoded.

This will get you all of the cars in a single integer

Quote from franky500 :

LOL sounds like you run like that all the time.


Cheers for the advise all.. i think i have my specs sorted out.

lol, I do (except 3dsmax), but I left out the numerous other browsers and programming apps for brevity

Glad we could be of help

Not worth the money for gaming. If you are a regular photoshopper who likes to have illustrator, 3dsmax, a few copies of Firefox with loads of tabs open, a couple or three IEs and a winamp or three going while you are playing LFS, you will notice a difference. Otherwise, the only difference is likely to be negative because of the smaller cache per core and lower clock speed.

Quote from mr Orange :

I'm having trouble in getting all the allowed cars from the host information (?action=hosts)
When I process the 4 bytes that hold the CARS information I only get the S1 cars (upto the MRT). Is there anyone who did sucseed in getting all the cars out?
Tnx

By the sounds of it you are only processing the first byte of the 4 bytes. You need to process them all because you can only get 8 cars in a byte.
The cars are in game order (i.e. the order they appear in the server list, left to right)

Last edited by Anarchi-H, Sat 8 Oct 2005, 15:28.

Quote from franky500 :

All has been a great help...so what processor you think (yes its for gaming...)

http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=3P77


http://www.dabs.com/productvie ... ationKey=11147,4294959319

Ouchies; Talk about extorsion. Try these guys

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products ... o.asp?WebProductID=152503

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products ... o.asp?WebProductID=211678

I'd go 3700 if you can afford it (and by the sounds of it you can) because of the larger cache.

Ignore vpr, he is talking out of his chocolate hole. X2s are expensive, and you'd either have to be severly loaded, or just plain daft to get one now. PCIE has only demonstrated real performance gains in high bandwidth applications that use it such as SATA controller boards, and parallel Video processing etc.
Granted, it will eventually yield gains, but we are a long way off yet.

Here is 14 pages on the topic.
http://www.tcmagazine.info/art ... =show&showarticle=127

As you can see, negligable performance difference. As for the real reason they dont make a 7800GTX for AGP, see here.

http://www.cooltechzone.com/in ... &id=1463&Itemid=0

VPR; As for you question, "How can a faster bus not be better"?
Think of it like a pipe. AGP is like 50mm diameter, and PCIE is like 200mm diameter. What difference is there if you are just pissing in to them? None. However, attach a high pressure jet to each and you'll start seeing a difference.

Currently GFX cards are akin to pissing in to the pipe.

Last edited by Anarchi-H, Sat 8 Oct 2005, 14:15.

I think it's been made clear that the PCI-E is a given, but good luck on finding a barton X2.

Current cores on sale for X2s are Toledo and Manchester, with the later being the most recent revision. (Although the Manchester is actually a cost cutting revision)
For a price guide (Retail), you are looking at ~£620 for a top spec X2, and ~£240 for a bottom spec X2. The 3500 the folks above have suggested drops in at around£140-150 and will give you the most bang for your buck at this moment in time.

The X2s excel at multithreaded applications, so unless you have something very specific that is intensive in a multi CPU way I'd recommend the same as above.

With some of the money you'll save from not buying a silly priced X2, I'd also suggest a 74GB WD Raptor (10KRPM SATA) for program storage, and a 250GB SATA drive for storage (or 2 if you can afford them and think you might want to develop a video collection ). The reason for this is windows can swap to disk faster, read, write and load stuff faster from the raptor. 250GB is the minimum you should consider HDD wise if you want to get the most for your money.

80GB * 2 @ £41 per drive (£82) = 1.9GB per £
120GB @ £58 = 2.06GB per £
160GB @ £54 = 2.9GB per £
200GB @ £60 = 3.3GB per £
250GB @ £70 = 3.57GB per £
300GB @ £87 = 3.4GB per £

Defrag time is not too bad as long as you keep it regular.

As for GFX, card, if you want uber performance, by all means go for a 7800, but they have abundant amounts of overkill for most stuff out today. A 256MB 6800GT would be my weapon of choice :-)

Also, regarding the memory, most high end corsair sticks don't exceed PC3200. However, if I were you I'd avoid the gimmicky pro series and go for 2 sets of 1GB PC3200 TwinX-XL (ending up with 4 sticks of 512).
My reasoning behind this is mainly performance based. While you can get 2GB TwinX sets (2x1024), most of the latencies are a bit weak.
The PC3200 TwinX-XL is about as fast as it gets

Seeing as you seem to be building a whole system, I'd also recommend upgrading the naff on board sound with one of the soundblaster x-fi cards

Hope that helps some

Last edited by Anarchi-H, Fri 7 Oct 2005, 20:40.

1600x1200 when I don't accidentally corrupt my windows partition from typing one wrong number in parted >_<
ATM its 140x50 (think text based)

Self employed (part time) web developer & designer (yes, there is a distinction), but to bring in the pennies when that isn't going so well, I help to supply the masses with bog cleaner.

Yeah TAA, get off your arse and give us a DLL or I'll be forced to unleash my really bad C skills on y'all

Thanks for the feedback

To answer the questions, it's actually done in photoshop, but there was absolutely no pixel pushing. It's all done using shapes, gradient overlays, patterns and text. It could easily be done in freehand or any of the usual vector tools, but I'm more comfortable with photoshop than any of those.

I will be doing some more when I get the time, but I'd like to try out some different styles and experiment a bit.

I don't really know where to put this because it isn't a screeny, but it isn't a 3d render either.

It's a subtly stylised vector rendering of an fxo gtr, done from scratch, but using a side profile of the gtr as a reference.

I hope it speaks for itself