Tonight I experienced something very peculiar and unnerving. While browsing the internet (the BBC UK political party poll ratings graph to be precise) I very gently touched my computer case with my foot, and fought nothing of it. However, a few seconds later, I noticed a number of vertical lines of pixels spanning the entire width of the monitor which were flashing. The machine had been up for a few days and folding with the graphics card, so I assumed that it had simply overheated or the driver had stopped working correctly, so I shutdown and left it for an hour.

When I rebooted, the lines had gone. However, after a few minutes, they returned (although there were only two lines now). At this point I decided that the graphics card must be dying. After all, it is second hand and about 2 years old (although it still performs well). I searched the internet for a while looking for forum posts or likewise on this subejct, but didn’t find anything specific to my problem.

I was just about to accept that I would have to spend £100+ on a new card when it crossed my mind to try the simplest thing possible. So, not really expecting anything to happen, I pushed the DVI cable from the monitor into the graphics card further and it went in about 5mm more. Along with this, all the lines were immediately gone, and the problem appears to be fixed.

This just goes to show that sometimes things can be fixed in much simpler ways than you initially expect!

Luke

Sigh.  My poor nVidia 8800GT looks like it’s dying on me.

A couple days ago, I started getting computer freezes when I was screwing around on the Champions Online Test server.  I hoped that it was due to the Test client and not my computer.  Just in case, I downloaded a GPU temperature monitor (CPUID Hardware Monitor is very good) and cleaned the dust out of my computer.

I installed Witcher yesterday and had a fun time playing it for a couple hours.  Everything seemed to be going okay, until I changed the graphics settings to high.  That triggered a long string of computer freezes.  Witcher freezes immediately now, no matter the setting.  I’ve had a few system restarts where my Windows 7 failed to reach the desktop.  I had a few system freezes where Windows 7 eventually recovered and told me that the videocard driver was non-responsive.  I had a few instances where I had some weird graphical artifacts on my screen.

I tried updating the videocard driver, but that didn’t help.

So now, I’m kinda hoping that something else in my Windows 7 installation became corrupted somehow.  I’m going to be spending a good number of hours over the next week doing some troubleshooting.  Sigh.

I bought the card more than a year and half ago.  Stupid me, I neglected to mail the warranty card, so I’m past the warranty period.  That means it’s probably better for me to just buy a brand new card, rather than messing with trying to get this card repaired or replaced.

As long as I spend at least $120, I can get a replacement card that is noticeably better than the 8800GT.  Over $250, it will be more than twice as fast.  So now is a decent time to upgrade, but I’m sad that I can’t upgrade my home theater PC with the 8800GT.

Oh well.  Lesson learned.  Always mail in the warranty cards for expensive components.

Hey guys! Welcome to another one of my little blog posts. Today I’m just going to talk about Nvidia’s Graphics Processing Units (GPU)

They’ve always been making nice cards, and always the best. ATI has been a good competitor, and still is, but they just never pull out a better graphics card. I’m going to start at Nvidia’s 8000 Series. They never go lower than #400 cards. So the first card in the series was the Nvidia GeForce 8400 GS.

With it’s half o’ gig VRAM (512MB) using GDDR2, you won’t need the best motherboard to fit it’s PCI-e 16x slot, and you’ll be able to play the best 2008 games at a reasonable rate at a low price! That’s under $100!

Then we have the Nvidia GeForce 8500 GS:
Price: Under $100
VRAM: 256MB / 512MB GDDR2
Memory Clock: 800 MHz
Slot Type: PCI-e
Also a okay card, a bit better than the 8400GS. So an okay 2008 games card.

After that it’s the always lovely, 8600GT & 8600 GTS. There’s not much differents between the GT and the GTS. Though the GTS is slightly better. GT first, then GT:
Price: Under $150
VRAM: 128MB / 256MB GDDR3
Memory Clock: 700MHz
Slot: PCI-e 16x

—–Nvidia GeForce 8600GTS—–
Price: Under $200
VRAM: 256MB GDDR3
Memory Clock: 1000MHz
Slot: PCI-e 16x (with 1 power plug)
Both cards are average for upcoming high-graphical games.

Now it’s time for the best part of the 8 series, the 88’s. There are five versions of the 8800 series, 8800GT, 8800GT for Mac, 8800GTS, 8800GTX and 8800 Ultra. I’m only going to be talking about the first, fourth and last card. 8800GT, 8800GTX and 8800 Ultra.
Price: Under $250
VRAM: 512MB GDDR3
Memory Clock: 1500MHz
Slot: PCI-e 2.0

——–8800GTX——-
Price: Under $400
VRAM: Up to 1GB GDDR3
Memory Clock: 2000 MHz
Slot: PCI-e 2.0 (with two power plugs)

——-8800 Ultra——-
Price: Under $500
VRAM: 1GB GDDR3
Memory Clock: 2160MHz
Slot: PCI-e 2.0

Bye Guys! And get the 8800GTX!

Bild: Macrumors

Anstelle der Standard Nvidia Geforce GT 120 Grafikkarte, die in den neuen Mac Pros, die gestern erschienen sind, verwendet werden, bietet Apple ein Upgrade auf die ATI Radeon HD 4870 zu einem Aufpreis von 180 Euro an.

Apple plant offenbar die ATI Karte als eigenständiges Produkt für die Vorgängerversion des Mac Pros, welche im Januar 2008 vorgestellt wurden, anzubieten. Momentan ist die Karte jedoch unter “derzeit nicht verfügbar gelistet”.

Interessant ist jedoch die Tatsache das die Karte mindestens Mac OS X 10.5.7 benötigt – was jedoch noch nicht veröffentlicht wurde. Kein Veröffentlichkeitsdatum ist für 10.5.7 angegeben und das Verfügbarkeitsdatum der ATI Karte lässt auf keines schließen.

Die Radeon HD 4870 wurde von Apple für den Mac Pro im letzten August mit “coming soon” versprochen, was nun erfüllt wurde.

Es ist nichts neues das Apple neuere Grafikkarten für Vorgängergenerationen des Mac Pros anbietet. So wurde die Nvidia 8800 GT Karte für die “1. Generation” des Mac Pros, welches im August 2006 vorgestellt wurde, in Form eines Upgrade-Kits angeboten.

]]> http://tagn.wordpress.com/2009/03/02/asus-eah4850-matrix/ Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:37:03 +0000 Wilhelm2451 http://tagn.wordpress.com/2009/03/02/asus-eah4850-matrix/

I needed a video card, and I needed one in a hurry.

Over the years I have upgraded my video card many times.  I always keep the old card handy just in case something goes wrong with the new one.  I like to have a fall-back position.

However, I was in a bind this time around.  My current system is PCI-Express and all my old video cards are AGP.  There was no fall-back position. And while the 8800GT was still operating in a minimal functionality mode, so at least I could do something on my computer, all video functions were set to “Slow & Painful.”

I did some quick research over at Tom’s Hardware.  They had their “Best Graphics Card for the Money” feature updated for February 09.  At my price target was the ATi 4850 based video card with 512MB or RAM.  It offered performance on par with my old card and was a design that had been on the market for a while, so should be stable.

But which version of the ATi 4850 to select?

I hunted around a bit, looking for the model with the best cooling arrangement.  I just wanted the card to last.

Finally I found a review over on Firing Squad that had potential.  The high-end ASUS version of the ATi 4850, the EAH4850 Matrix looked to be just about the thing I was after.  A quick visit to ZipZoomFly.com and it was ordered and on its way to me.

Friday the package arrived.

I opened the shipping box and picked up the contents.

I removed the black sleeve from the black box.  I opened up the black box and began to go through the black cardboard inserts.  Inside of the biggest black insert was a static bag held close with black tape.  Inside the bag was a video card built on a black PCB, covered with black integrated circuits on one side and a large black housing for a cooling system on the other, in the middle of which was a large black fan.  Once installed, little black lights labeled in black on a black background lit up black to indicate the black video card was now operational.

Okay, except for the last sentence, everything in that last paragraph was true.  ASUS has a black theme going on with this card.  This is truly Hotblack Desiato’s Video Card.

The card itself is a double-wide.  You need to open two covers on the backplane of your computer case, one for the video connectors and one for the heatsink exhaust.  That doesn’t bother me, but some people may resent the space it takes up.  Somewhere over the last 10 years I stopped needing to populate every last slot on the motherboard.

And how does it run?

With my in-game video settings left over from the 8800GT, things feel about the same.  Of course, I spent most of the weekend playing EVE Online or World of Warcraft, neither of which really taxes a video card.  But I did go run around in Lord of the Rings Online for a bit, and things felt about the same there.

As for heat, the ASUS iTracker application that comes with the card let me keep an eye on that.  I used it to change the cooling settings to be somewhat more aggressive in spinning up the fan on the card.

The fan itself is reasonably quiet.  I can hear it quite clearly when it comes on, but it isn’t loud and it just joins the chorus of fan noises that eminate from the computer case under my desk.

We shall see how the card operates in the long term, but for now I am back up and running.

Earlier this week I noticed that video on my computer was behaving oddly.  Strange artifacts now and again, things I would have attributed 20 years ago to problems with video memory.

Then last night when I poked my nose into Lord of the Rings Online, that was enough to push the card over the edge into failure mode.  All 3D operations appear to have ceased.  The card, thankfully, has fallen back to some minimal operation state, so I can still do things like type angry blog posts (without pictures), but everything is very slow on the screen.

Are you old enough to remember when scrolling text in a large Word document was a stress test for a video card?  Yeah, I’m operating with that level of video support now.  Scrolling down the page on my blog is a test of my patience.

The card, my second 8800GT after the first one failed almost a year back (also while playing LOTRO) has not given me a lot of faith in nVidia for the moment.

So for my next video card, just in time to be my birthday present I suppose, I think I will jump back to the ATi side of the video world with a 4850 based card.

But no Lord of the Rings Online for a while, not until I get the card replaced.  At least I can update my EVE Online skill training on our iMac.  Go CCP and Mac OSX support!

The 8800 GT was released around November 07 and was considered pretty good value for money at the time, along with the higher-end 8800 GTS 512mb. It was nice the NVIDIA used a new die size and chip (G92) in the middle of a generation of cards although it seems that NVIDIA are kinda slacking off in terms of x800GT cards. The 9800 GT (what everyone expected to be the next gen equivalent of the 8800GT) was just a rebranded card. No difference whatsoever once you peel away the fancy sticker. It’s the same story with the new GT240 which NVIDIA claim to will supersede the 9800GT.  Guess what? Its the same as the 9800GT. So, anyone up for a “new” card that’s almost 2 and a half years old? Didn’t think so.

On another note, the GT 250 is going to be “based” on the 9800GTX+, a souped up version of the 9800GTX made to compete with the ATI HD4850. I’d expect more of the same.

Earlier this week, Ubuntu 8.04 update manager notified me of new kernel updates and I went ahead and installed them. I have rarely had any problem with such updates in the past. But this morning things went differently. I use an Acer P241w  monitor with1920×1200 resolution. First thing I noticed when i rebooted is that my screen resolution has shrunk to 640×480 and I could not change it to anything else when I went to the screen resolution preferences. I use a Nvidia 8800GT. It is considered to be fairly new card in terms of driver support in Ubuntu. I could not get it to work in Gutsy Gibbon when I tried late last year (even with the help of Envy).

When I had installed 8.04 earlier this year the system automatically detected and gave me the option to install the restricted Nvidia driver. After that it had been fairly straight forward for me to enable compiz-fusion and set the correct screen resolution. I never had to directly download Nvidia driver from their website or mess around with xorg.conf, etc.

So when I lost the screen resolution, I tried a number of things. Looked at my  /etc/X11/xorg.conf and I noticed all the usual monitor resolution options were gone. Then I tried to specify the monitor type using displayconfig-gtk. I chose the generic LCD monitor option with 1920×1200 resolution and did check the widescreen checkbox. Did a reboot and still the screen resolution preference dialog did not show me any of the resolution options I was expecting. I then proceeded to check the System->Administration->Hardware Drivers which shows me that the Nvidia restricted driver was not enabled. I enabled it and still it did not help much. I disabled and re-enabled it to force a new install of the restricted driver.

At this point I was getting desperate. Finally seeking and browsing suggestions from wonderful folks on Ubuntu Forums sorted things out. It appears some of the kernel mods sometimes cause load failure with the newer Nvidia driver modules. Best option in such case is to reinstall the driver. Obviously the restricted Nvidia driver that is being distrbuted from the ubuntu repository did not work for me. So combining a number of suggestions from Ubuntuforums and Compiz-Fusion.org I managed to get stuff working finally.

1. Downloaded the latest linux Nvidia GeForce 8 driver for my card from Nvidia 
2. Installed it by executing sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-173.14.12.pkg1.run. I simply answered yes to all the prompts. Even after the install I was still having issues possibly due to conflicts with the existing restricted driver on the system. My login prompt screen would be nice 1920×1200. But as soon as I log in I would get a unreadable screen with horizontal lines across the screen. In that situation I would ssh in remotely and switch back to an earlier xorg.conf to get a smaller but legible screen after a reboot and login. I did notice that the restricted driver was still showing up in Hardware drivers control panel.
3. Putting a DISABLED_MODULES="nv" entry in /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common seemed to fix the screen readability issue. But now I was getting a 1920×1200 desktop screen which extended beyond the physical monitor size and I was able to drag it around!
4. I also could not enable compiz effects. But, based on compiz-fusion.org forum research executing the following that took care of the effects problem.
   • nvidia-xconfig --composite
   • nvidia-xconfig --allow-glx-with-composite
   • nvidia-xconfig --render-accel
   • nvidia-xconfig --add-argb-glx-visuals
5. Regarding the screen extending beyond the physical monitor, I noticed the scan frequency was set at 50Hz on the screen preference dialog. Setting it to 58Hz took care of it.
6. This time I made sure I had a backup of the xorg.conf!

This time the tial and error process probably messed things up a bit more. Next time I would probably just start with a video driver uninstall first.

Graphics card manufacturer nVidia have released a new set of drivers for their 8, 9 and 200 series graphics cards which enable them to perform ‘PhysX’ processing. Which is, of course, a silly way of spelling ‘physics’. If you’ve got one of the new cards and fancy giving the new features a spin, head over to the nVidia website where you’ll find the drivers along with some graphical demos.

For more detailed information, I highly recommend having a read of the brilliant Koroush Gazi’s nVidia tweakguide. If you can’t wait to download the new drivers or are stuck with an older graphics card, here’s a video showing some of the sexy new features in action:

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En términos de computadoras, asi como en autos y otros temas de colección y hobbies, lo que importa es quien la tiene mas grande, o más linda mas mejor (diría Guevarita). Por eso puse todas mis moneditas de 5 y 10 centavos para comprar esta belleza:

PNY XLR8 8800GT 512MB. Ahora si puedo despedazar oponentes, ver pececitos debajo del agua, pajarillos volando y explosiones que me aflojen los dientes! Hell Yeah!

Friday night marked the return of at least some of the WoW instance group to Lord of the Rings Online.

It was unplanned, but after my wife went to bed early (she stretched out on the bed for a minute and then the sandman crept up and mugged her… it was a long week for her) I decided to just log into LOTRO for a few minutes, just to look around.

But once in I was hailed by Skronk and Ula who were also getting reacquainted with the game. They were in the North Downs around Nan Amlug. Since I was near Trestlebridge, I hopped on my new mount and headed out to play with them. Our group consisted of Skronk’s captain, Ula’s minstrel, and my guardian, Nomu.

We picked up some quests from the area and went out hunting.

High points of being in LOTRO again.

Graphics – Wow, I had forgotten how beautiful Middle-earth can be in LOTRO

Appearance Tab – There is not one, but two appearance tabs in LOTRO, so you can have two outfits on hand. You can see in the picture above Nomu is wearing a bucket hat in his appearance tab in anticipation of the upcoming fishing hobby.

Ambient Sound – Out in the fields the ambient sounds were quite amazing, some of the best I recall hearing in an MMO.

The Founder’s Horse – While not as swift as the mounts that can be purchase at level 35, they are both free and faster than walking, which makes travel in the game much easier. All three of us are founders, so we were all able to ride.

General – Skills seem to have been tweaked since we last played together. While still very rusty, we were able to work as a team fairly effectively.

All in all we had a good time. I think we all need some warming up in the game, both to get used to some of its quirks (the UI just is not as responsive as WoW’s) and to come up to speed with all the changes that have come into the game since we last played in the fall of 2007.

I will have to keep an eye on a couple things though.

The first is money. Theoretically Nomu should be able to buy a better horse at level 35. However the price, 4 gold and a couple hundred silver, seems way beyond what he will have been able to save by that point. Quest rewards and vendor items off of mobs seem to be barely keeping ahead of the repair bill after an evening in the field. I hope I don’t have to start working the auction house just to start making money.

And the other is my video card. I would like to avoid any further video card issues, so I have been turning the fans up and watching the temperature on the 8800GT.

Still, the green fields of Middle-earth seemed very welcoming.

The replacement 8800GT arrived from Velocity Micro yesterday afternoon. So after a quick swap I was able to try the new card out.

The first thing I did was run the nVidia stability test which would cause the old card to crash within 30 seconds, regardless of card temperature.

The new card ran through a 10 minute pass without issue.

Then I brought up LOTRO, got out my hunter, and played for a little over an hour.

No issues their either. Plus, my hunter hit level 24. Only one more level until he gets his first horse.

So I am all set to play Lord of the Rings Online again.

And a good thing too.

Within the instance group there has been some renewed interest in LOTRO.

Skronk (Potshot) has been back in the game a bit.

Ula has shown some interest in coming back to play now that housing is available.

And I have had the urge to go back for a while now, which is why I have been griping about my video card issue.

And that urge increased when I read that one of the new Book 13 features is fishing!

Fishing!

For no good reason I end up fishing in almost every MMO I play. (There is no fishing in EVE Online… but mining is pretty much the moral equivalent.)

I like that Turbine has declared fishing a “hobby” as opposed to a profession. Although you can cook your fish and eat them if you have the right profession, the true spirit that seems to be in play here is titles and such, always a strong point in LOTRO.

So look for me on the shores of Nen Harn, fishing pole in hand, some day soon.

Well, at least Velocity Mirco is taking care of me. I received a note from them this morning with that line.

And, unlike my experiences last year with the x1950 card, I don’t have to send them my card first, then wait around for them to finish. Thank you VM!

In a case of “One screenshot is worth 1,000 minutes on hold,” my LOTRO screen artifacts picture seemed to be enough, along with a short description I submitted to Velocity Micro via their online support page, for them to RMA the card.

So, if LOTRO locking up and making your screen look like this:

feel free to borrow my screen shot.

Of course, I only got to the point of asking them for support after I had exhausted all other paths (so you see, my behavior in EVE is part of my flawed personality) I could think of with my system. Now I have to undo some of those as EVE has started abending on me at random points while I am mining or fighting.

Life in the fast lane I guess.

But at least I might be able to get LOTRO up an stable in time for the 1 year anniversary of it going live.

Fala pessoal, beleza?

Bom, estou aqui pra postar mais um vídeo para vocês, mais agora, um do Test Drive Unlimited, que como a gente sabe, é um game bem rox! Vocês devem estar pensando que eu postei ele, para ver como o jogo fica numa 8800GT, mais na verdade foi por causa da combinação Vídeo+Música. Achei muito legal a música do vídeo, sendo que a tempos q eu a ouço, mais nunca numa versão assim xD~

Espero que gostem!

Nome da música: Lambada Versão Radio

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JaOkS_