are you running any temperature monitoring software or anything like that which may be writing logs to the hard drive. If these truly are random glitches and not happening at regular intervals its not likely but perhaps worth a quick check
SLI memory has nothing to do with SLI graphics it is basicaly memory that has extra profiles in it to give better performance. As the poster before me said its really just marketing which is not worth paying any extra for
read here for a bit more info
http://www.behardware.com/news ... ce-sli-memory-ou-epp.html
read here for a bit more info
http://www.behardware.com/news ... ce-sli-memory-ou-epp.html
Jakg thanks for the reminder forgot to mention crossfire. I have an older SLI board which either runs either 1 16xPCI-E or 2 8xPCI-E slots so im not sure if im gonna be able to run a new 8800 and another cardas the 8800 requires a 16xPCI-E channel all to itself. I plan to test this as soon as I get the time.
4GB probably is overkill but its nice 
although be aware that a 32bit OS will probably only see between 2.5 an 3GB of it.
Ram speed does not need to match the graphics card. DDR2 800MHZ/ PC2 6400 is probably a good choice for performance/ price although go for the modules with lower timings i.e 4,4,4,12 or 4,4,4,15. DDR2 1066MHz/ PC2 8500 is top spec memory but has a high cost compared to the 800MHz stuff I dont think its worth the extra cost personally as it will only give you a few percent increase in system performance but costs about twice as much. Id rather have 4GB of 800MHz than 2GB of 1066MHz
this is £35 for 2GB DDR2 800MHz /PC2 6400
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/116755
Raid is supported at the board/ chipset level - the hard drive connections to the MB remain the same - all raid systems ive seen are configured just after post and before booting to OS. However the results ive seen for raid have not been that spectacular and have only offered a small increase in performance but there is greater risk associated with it. If one drive fails you loose all data from both drives if you are running striped raid. Now RAID 5 is a different matter Id love to be running that on my server but the cost is far to great.
TO SLI or not to SLI
Sli is one of those things that works quite well for some games but gives hardly any advantage in others. I would personnaly rather buy a single faster card than 2 slower cards in SLI. However I do have an SLI board and i am so glad that I have. The reason is that ive just discovered softTH. This is free software that enables you to run a tripple head setup as long as you can get 2 PCI-E graphics cards in your system. Only one card does the rendering so the second card can be a cheap one as its only used to ouput to a display. The result is that I have got 3 monitors running in LFS and I love it. However the best idea is to identify what games your going to be playing and have a look at some benchmarks from a site like this
http://www.anandtech.com/video ... =3&manu=&manukey=
you will have to look around a bit to find the right article for you - sorry i dont have time to im supposed to be studying
PSU
I can absolutely garantee that the PSU you have selected will be more than powerfull enough. I have just fitted an 8800GT into a machine (not mine unfortunately ) which is running a 350watt PSU. Its also running an AMD 64 3200+ 2GD DDR ram and all the normal bits. I recon the total system draw is about 250 watts although cant tell for sure untill ive put a power meter on it.
the bees have gone into hibernation - they will be back in the spring :P
/edit wow last 3 posts appeared whilst i was writing
stripped mirrored RAID will give you increased performance as well as reliability although you loose half of your total capacity by running this configuration. Theoretically RAID 0 (I think thats striped raid) should give you twice the preformance but quite simply it does not.
although be aware that a 32bit OS will probably only see between 2.5 an 3GB of it.Ram speed does not need to match the graphics card. DDR2 800MHZ/ PC2 6400 is probably a good choice for performance/ price although go for the modules with lower timings i.e 4,4,4,12 or 4,4,4,15. DDR2 1066MHz/ PC2 8500 is top spec memory but has a high cost compared to the 800MHz stuff I dont think its worth the extra cost personally as it will only give you a few percent increase in system performance but costs about twice as much. Id rather have 4GB of 800MHz than 2GB of 1066MHz
this is £35 for 2GB DDR2 800MHz /PC2 6400
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/116755
Raid is supported at the board/ chipset level - the hard drive connections to the MB remain the same - all raid systems ive seen are configured just after post and before booting to OS. However the results ive seen for raid have not been that spectacular and have only offered a small increase in performance but there is greater risk associated with it. If one drive fails you loose all data from both drives if you are running striped raid. Now RAID 5 is a different matter Id love to be running that on my server but the cost is far to great.
TO SLI or not to SLI
Sli is one of those things that works quite well for some games but gives hardly any advantage in others. I would personnaly rather buy a single faster card than 2 slower cards in SLI. However I do have an SLI board and i am so glad that I have. The reason is that ive just discovered softTH. This is free software that enables you to run a tripple head setup as long as you can get 2 PCI-E graphics cards in your system. Only one card does the rendering so the second card can be a cheap one as its only used to ouput to a display. The result is that I have got 3 monitors running in LFS and I love it. However the best idea is to identify what games your going to be playing and have a look at some benchmarks from a site like this
http://www.anandtech.com/video ... =3&manu=&manukey=
you will have to look around a bit to find the right article for you - sorry i dont have time to im supposed to be studying
PSU
I can absolutely garantee that the PSU you have selected will be more than powerfull enough. I have just fitted an 8800GT into a machine (not mine unfortunately
) which is running a 350watt PSU. Its also running an AMD 64 3200+ 2GD DDR ram and all the normal bits. I recon the total system draw is about 250 watts although cant tell for sure untill ive put a power meter on it.the bees have gone into hibernation - they will be back in the spring :P
/edit wow last 3 posts appeared whilst i was writing
stripped mirrored RAID will give you increased performance as well as reliability although you loose half of your total capacity by running this configuration. Theoretically RAID 0 (I think thats striped raid) should give you twice the preformance but quite simply it does not.
Last edited by bolders, .
It might be worth while looking here for component prices also.
www.ebuyer.co.uk
Ive used them a lot and ive generally found thier prices to be as good as anywhere. Also thier returns policy is very good - they even send the courier to collect you rma free of charge
sometimes ebuyer is a bit mainstream and doesnt have the more exotic stuff in which case my first port of call is here
www.overclockers.co.uk
I have to say that the 8800GT is a stonking card with a pretty low power requirement. However the new GTS is definately faster than the GT but im in two minds wheather or not the poerformance gain is worth the price increase.
Also this card has a slightly higher clock than the alpha dog and is £199.97 and has 10 year waranty in uk (from overclockers)
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/ ... ;catid=56&subcat=1008
core 675 (alpha dog 640)
shader 1674 (alpha dog 1500)
mem 1950 (alpha dog 1900)
Livetime waranty (10 year in uk tho i think) - alpha dog 2 year waranty
and the alpha dog is the same price £199.97
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/ ... ;catid=56&subcat=1008
All in all I would say you have a nicely balanced and powerful system there although I dont really think its possible to buy a PC that is future proofed for 3 yrs nowadays lol :P
bolders
www.ebuyer.co.uk
Ive used them a lot and ive generally found thier prices to be as good as anywhere. Also thier returns policy is very good - they even send the courier to collect you rma free of charge
sometimes ebuyer is a bit mainstream and doesnt have the more exotic stuff in which case my first port of call is here
www.overclockers.co.uk
I have to say that the 8800GT is a stonking card with a pretty low power requirement. However the new GTS is definately faster than the GT but im in two minds wheather or not the poerformance gain is worth the price increase.
Also this card has a slightly higher clock than the alpha dog and is £199.97 and has 10 year waranty in uk (from overclockers)
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/ ... ;catid=56&subcat=1008
core 675 (alpha dog 640)
shader 1674 (alpha dog 1500)
mem 1950 (alpha dog 1900)
Livetime waranty (10 year in uk tho i think) - alpha dog 2 year waranty
and the alpha dog is the same price £199.97
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/ ... ;catid=56&subcat=1008
All in all I would say you have a nicely balanced and powerful system there although I dont really think its possible to buy a PC that is future proofed for 3 yrs nowadays lol :P
bolders
HI Andy
What are you using your PC for because I dont really think you will gain much by upgrading your CPU especially if you are mainly gaming as most games are GFX limited. If you can post some usage patterns for your PC I can give you a better answer though. I would either spend the money on something else which will give you greater benefit or just wait longer as CPU prices are always falling. However if you are doing a lot of rendering or encoding etc a quad will certainly provide more performance than a dual core.
The CPU you have got is pretty damn good and will overclock very easily to at least 3GHz if you are into that sort of thing. The 1066MHz bus that your chip uses is also useful for this purpose imo.
bolders
What are you using your PC for because I dont really think you will gain much by upgrading your CPU especially if you are mainly gaming as most games are GFX limited. If you can post some usage patterns for your PC I can give you a better answer though. I would either spend the money on something else which will give you greater benefit or just wait longer as CPU prices are always falling. However if you are doing a lot of rendering or encoding etc a quad will certainly provide more performance than a dual core.
The CPU you have got is pretty damn good and will overclock very easily to at least 3GHz if you are into that sort of thing. The 1066MHz bus that your chip uses is also useful for this purpose imo.
bolders
Have a look in windows control panel then select Game controllers and select properties tab for your wheel. Assuming the drivers are installed correctly there should be a check box to enable/disable combined axis. Make sure that this is set to use seperate axis.
Bigos suggestion of changing the game setting to combined should also work but it would seem silly to use a combined axis when you can run seperate axis.
Also check this link out for full configuration details of G25 in LFS - it really does help.
http://en.lfsmanual.net/wiki/Wheels#Logitech_G25
scroll down to bottom of page and read section titled
Correctly setting up a Logitech Wheel
Bigos suggestion of changing the game setting to combined should also work but it would seem silly to use a combined axis when you can run seperate axis.
Also check this link out for full configuration details of G25 in LFS - it really does help.
http://en.lfsmanual.net/wiki/Wheels#Logitech_G25
scroll down to bottom of page and read section titled
Correctly setting up a Logitech Wheel
YOu dont know how long ive been waiting for some good hi-res 3d glasses at reasonable cost to be sold so I can run it with a trackIR - that would be so awsome
firstly can you confirm that you are using a router and if so what make and model it is.
a bit of background for you...
basically when u are using a router u have 2 IP addresses. Your external IP provided by your isp and your internal LAN adress (i.e. the address of your computer - maybe something like 192.168.1.xxx). When you are using a server which is talking to the outside world people connecting to it will see your external IP (the one provided by your ISP) but this is not the IP of your PC. For the information to reach your PC your router needs to forward the data to your internal IP address. To do this you go into the routers settings and tell the router to forward traffic on the relevant port (i think the default is 63392 for LFS) and point it to the IP address of your computer. However the way this is achieved varies between router and it would be helpful to know what make/model your using.
a bit of background for you...
basically when u are using a router u have 2 IP addresses. Your external IP provided by your isp and your internal LAN adress (i.e. the address of your computer - maybe something like 192.168.1.xxx). When you are using a server which is talking to the outside world people connecting to it will see your external IP (the one provided by your ISP) but this is not the IP of your PC. For the information to reach your PC your router needs to forward the data to your internal IP address. To do this you go into the routers settings and tell the router to forward traffic on the relevant port (i think the default is 63392 for LFS) and point it to the IP address of your computer. However the way this is achieved varies between router and it would be helpful to know what make/model your using.
Yes for 6DOF you require the track clip and an unlock code. The link you have posted above is of the track clip. All the track clip is, is a wire thingy with 3 reflective rectangles on it. By measuring the distances between these 3 points head position can be measured in 6DOF. The original 2DOF systems only used a single reflective point. However it should be noted that you will probably need a baseball cap or something to mount the track clip onto.
bolders
edit: Im pretty sure the track IR 4 comes complete with the track clip. The track clip on its own is an upgrade for owners of the track IR 3 pro. I will confirm this later as a friend has the TrackIR 4 PRO. HE uses it a lot for flight sims but says that it is distracting when using it with driving games.
bolders
edit: Im pretty sure the track IR 4 comes complete with the track clip. The track clip on its own is an upgrade for owners of the track IR 3 pro. I will confirm this later as a friend has the TrackIR 4 PRO. HE uses it a lot for flight sims but says that it is distracting when using it with driving games.
Last edited by bolders, .
intgr
Can you post some more pictures of the insides of the wheel. Im interested on how the thing is designed but dont want to take my wheel apart - cheers
bolders
Can you post some more pictures of the insides of the wheel. Im interested on how the thing is designed but dont want to take my wheel apart - cheers
bolders
It seems that you get the parts required for 6DOF with the trackIR 4 PRO. The picture shows the pack comes with the clip that allows this function (its the wirethingy with the 3 rectangles connected to it).
Looking at your second post I cant really see the need for you to upgrade other than gfx and maybe hard drive if your running out of space.
GFX
I would personally stay away from the 8500GT as it is a budget card. Buy a more expensive card and keep your existing CPU and memory to save the difference in cost.
For graphics I would personally go for a Nvidia 8800GT 512MB
like this
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/135567
and here is a review
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3140
the 8800GTS 512MB is slightlty faster but imo does not warrant the extra cost (dont confuse with the 320 or 640MB versions as they are pretty much outdated now)
SLI means scalable link interface (i think) and it basically means that you can put 2 graphics cards of the same time in one computer however results vary from game to game. Some games work quite well with SLI and some show no increase in performance at all when compared to running a single card. IMO it is better to buy 1 fast card than 2 mediocre ones.
HARD DISKS
Samsung spinpoints are rated as being one of the better hard disks out there at the moment and 500GB disks probably have the cheapest cost per GB. like this one
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/130454
My personal preferance however is seagate as they come with 5 year warranties although my 500GB s a bit noisy (but as it is in my server its not a problem) whereas the spinpoints are supposed to be very quiet.
BTW Your core 2 duo should overclock very nicely (should hit at least 3GHz). For gaming a quad core CPU will not generally provide much benefit at the present time although some games like the new unreal tournament do use multicore cpus more effectively. However if i was upgrading now i would choose a quadcore but thats mainly because i do a lot of rendering which takes soooooo long. However if I was running an E6550 (which i think is what you have got) I would not even be considering upgrading it at this time. (for comparison i am running an AMD X2 3800 - 2GHz) which still does me fine.
bolders
GFX
I would personally stay away from the 8500GT as it is a budget card. Buy a more expensive card and keep your existing CPU and memory to save the difference in cost.
For graphics I would personally go for a Nvidia 8800GT 512MB
like this
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/135567
and here is a review
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3140
the 8800GTS 512MB is slightlty faster but imo does not warrant the extra cost (dont confuse with the 320 or 640MB versions as they are pretty much outdated now)
SLI means scalable link interface (i think) and it basically means that you can put 2 graphics cards of the same time in one computer however results vary from game to game. Some games work quite well with SLI and some show no increase in performance at all when compared to running a single card. IMO it is better to buy 1 fast card than 2 mediocre ones.
HARD DISKS
Samsung spinpoints are rated as being one of the better hard disks out there at the moment and 500GB disks probably have the cheapest cost per GB. like this one
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/130454
My personal preferance however is seagate as they come with 5 year warranties although my 500GB s a bit noisy (but as it is in my server its not a problem) whereas the spinpoints are supposed to be very quiet.
BTW Your core 2 duo should overclock very nicely (should hit at least 3GHz). For gaming a quad core CPU will not generally provide much benefit at the present time although some games like the new unreal tournament do use multicore cpus more effectively. However if i was upgrading now i would choose a quadcore but thats mainly because i do a lot of rendering which takes soooooo long. However if I was running an E6550 (which i think is what you have got) I would not even be considering upgrading it at this time. (for comparison i am running an AMD X2 3800 - 2GHz) which still does me fine.
bolders
FGED GREDG RDFGDR GSFDG