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Quick question about the aforementioned Asus Essence STX II sound card. I'm just doing a new build, and I've put this card in the bottom-most X4 slot, to give my GPU room to breath. When it's in this slot, two capacitors on the card are touching the plastic surface of the USB 3.0 front panel...

Someone mentioned on another site that throttling should be in fact working. I went into Device Manager, and for whatever reason there was a standard VGA Adapter installed alongside the 580 GTX, as well as some hidden older Monitor profiles. Uninstalled those, rebooted, and now things are...

After being a longtime ATI user, I just switched to Nvidia partly to get a top of the line card, and partly because I'm getting fed up with ATI's habit of screwing things up on a regular basis. Anyway, after getting my GTX 580 installed, I'm curious about the stock clock speeds. With ATI...

The AvP is cool, but those models are retarded dense when tesselation is on. They're denser than a typical 3D-model they use for CG in a big-budget film.

God, with the size of these things we're going to need some sort of new tech in the future so we can have external video-cards. Have it set up in some enclosure like an external HD, and then we can just plug-and-play it where we want. Hell, that would even let us hot swap cards as needed. Buy...

While I do wish ATI would have better stock cooling on their cards, it's a bit shortsighted to say they're just crap at making coolers. 3D cards are very expensive to begin with, and ATI doesn't want to unnecessarily raise the price of their cards when the stock cooler will be fine for 90% of...

No, you're thinking of bump-maps. Bump-mapping is a texture trick to make it look like there's depth. Dsiplacement maps are textures that actually modify vertices in 3-dimensions to achieve depth.

Something about the Tesselation in this benchmark seems fishy. If the Tesselation feature is dynamically generating new polys for increased detail, how exactly do the program know how to shape those polys into the right shape for a particular bit of detail? I know you can use displacement and...

Yeah, it's pretty damn quiet. I wouldn't call it silent, but it's certainly something you don't really notice unless you make an effort to listen for it. I didn't have a spare Noctua for the bottom compartment, so I used a spare 1100rpm Gentle Typhoon I had. It's either that or the 4890 that's...

I wouldn't say I'm a huge fan, I just found it hilarious that Bioware release an EXTREEEEMMEEE!!!1 trailer glorifying the amount of blood and violence in the game, all set to Mansons "The New Shit". A week later after the entire fanbase exploded at the ridiculous aim of Biowares marketing...

Don't you guys understand? This game is The New Shit™. The New Shit™ won't be denied.

Lets just go back to ultra basics and name cards extremely simply. "Introducing our latest card, the ATI-1. Stay tuned cause in a few months well be releasing the ATI-2, with future plans for the ATI-3 next year."

So you're saying if I set everything to high quality, I'll have better IQ in my games? Damn, this is news! Can we get this on the front page?

Choices are nice, but no one bothered to take advantage of the upgradability. You could argue that only audio techs would bother using this feature on a card like the AWE32, but then again, no serious audio tech was going to buy an AWE32 when far superior pro-audio solutions existed.

It's not actually out yet, it hasn't sold-out.

Just built up a new rig when I switched to Windows 7. This is the first time I've made any effort to hide some of the cables, so my work is definitely not up to the standards of the some the wizards I've seen here. Still, I'm quite happy with the way it turned out. Of course, the back panel...

It's inching ever closer into my dripping talons. Soon it will be mine, and yes, I will feed it innocent graphics to process.

Not to mention the acoustic profile says the cooler is only .2 sone quieter than the stock cooler, but if you notice it's with the Accelero fan running at 2000rpm and the stock fan at 2700rpm. I really wish AC would get away from this "sone" BS as well. Even if it is a better measure of...

Whoah, a 9 year old TV reference. Topical.

Yep, I just installed Vantage myself and I recall it installing Physx. You could always get the Physx drivers from Nvidia's site, but I did that myself and my Vantage score dropped, so it might be better just reinstalling Vantage to get the specific Physx drivers it comes with.

The goofy thing is that any drivers/games that install the Physx drivers don't seem to uninstall it when you uninstall said drivers/games. Pain in the ass when you notice it hanging around later and you can't remember if the current games on your drive installed it, and need it to run, or...

No. There are a few that sound quite important, but I disabled the plainly obvious ones that didn't do anything really important. I'm seeing if there's a guide about tweaking it yet, so your best bet is to look for one too to make sure you don't disable anything important.

Check your Task Sheduler. Win7 has a metric ass-load of pointless scheduled tasks set up after an install. I remember when XP came out it maybe had one or two tasks set up in the scheduler after an install. I checked out the scheduler in 7 last night and there must have been at least 40 tasks...

Not really. Any games that need the Physx drivers for software emulation will include them in the install.

Good to know. I've never really used either program before, so I was kind of in the dark about what to expect with the results.

I just finished building a new rig, and I've been testing with 3D Mark Vantage and 3D Mark 06 for the first time. Even though the online results browser compares your rig to others with similar setups, I was wondering if anyone could comment on my scores as far as real world performance goes...

Probably the fact you are running the release candidate. The demos are probably reading the build number of Win7 (for some odd reason), and simply refusing to run if they don't detect a retail 7 build number.

I think the main draw of the Vapor cards is how quiet they are. Honestly, who cares if the card is quiet at idle, that as basic feature I would expect any competently designed card to have. Under load most of ATI's top tier cards have noisy fans, and the Vapor cards can certainly alleviate those...

While they provide no juicy details, Sapphire sent out a press release today talking about the Vapor-X coolers on some of their cards. At the end of the article, they do confirm that Vapor-X will be coming to the ATI 5000 series "soon". So now we've had a photo, and along with that we can...

I always thought the best use of Eyefinity would have been the odd configurations of different monitor sizes in mixed wide and portrait modes. If you put three monitors in portrait mode next to eachother, you're basically just emulating a larger widescreen monitor. Which begs the question why...

Are Neweggs product listings correct in that if you buy the OEM version, you can only get the 32 or 64 bit version in a single package, not both? For the OEM versions of Win7, they only list one or the other for sale, unlike the full retail version which includes both 32 and 64 bit in one package.

Here in Canada..... maybe 6 months, what a joke. BB is new, but while Future Shop was never the pinnacle of hardware sales, it's like they've totally given up trying to compete with the boutique retailers. They don't even sell the vast majority off add-in computer components, and most of the...

Good info! I was probably going to go with two cards in Crossfire anyway, but this cements it.

Quick question, ignoring cost/power management/etc etc, which would be a better choice; an x2 card or two cards in SLI/Crossfire? Does one option or the other carry benefits as far as performance goes?

What exactly is going on with ATI in regards to game fixes anyway? Go back even just a year and every driver release is packed with fixes for the latest games. It seems though since then that every new driver release has less and less fixes for games. I'm thinking they've either gotten...

Thanks for the info guys! I remember it being such a pain in the ass last time, I was all ready to install XP and then I read about the F6 driver needed for the then-new AHCI options. Took me a while to dig up an old floppy drive, something I had hoped to have finally gotten rid of.

Just curious if anyone can tell me if I'll need to install some sort of F6 driver when installing Win7 when the SATA boot drive is set to AHCI? I've never installed any versions of 7 yet, but I'm compiling drivers a for a new build and I remember my last build needing an F6 driver when...

Please be Vapor-X.

Hopefully the chosen female achieves the same accolades and level of respect the Frag Dolls have earned.: rolleyes:

I'm in it to win it.