Recent content by Graogrim

I faced the choice recently between a 660ti or a 670. I looked at AMD but some of the games that I'm currently playing offer PhysX support so I ended up staying with Nvidia. I ended up picking the 670 and I'm very pleased with its performance. Looking ahead to things like Crysis 3 it appears to...

Positive: 3dfx Voodoo -- The true pioneer that brought hardware 3D into the mainstream. GeForce 256 -- Brought hardware transform and lighting to consumers. GeForce 3 -- Shaders were a game-changer. GeForce 4 Ti 4200 -- It was probably the best bang for the buck for its time ever...

Diamond Monster 3D (orignal Voodoo) + STB Powergraph 64 Creative Voodoo 2 + same 2D as above STB Velocity 4400 (TNT) Creative Labs TNT2 Ultra Elsa Gladiac GeForce 2 GTS (Holy crap this was almost 12 years ago!) PNY GeForce 4 4200 (Good performance but it died an ugly death. Bad components I...

Check Microcenter. Last time I was there they had the i5 3570K for $169.99. Seriously. It blew my mind.

I don't foresee myself upgrading substantially before 2014. Granted, something unexpected and amazing could come out of nowhere on the hardware front, but what besides Crysis 3 (which reasonable existing hardware should handle competently anyway) is going to push it?

Having a visual interface for the BIOS is not nearly as compelling as you might think. My current motherboard has one, and while it was a nifty novelty at first, after two weeks I wasn't even noticing it anymore. Truth be told I haven't looked at it more than once in the past three months. The...

Bottlenecks exist in every system that falls short of infinite performance. They'll vary depending on the application you choose, but the easiest way to determine whether your video card specifically is your system's current bottleneck is to vary the display resolution of that app. If your...

The 285 does enjoy a considerable advantage in both raw fillrate (51.8 GTex/s vs 37.8 for the stock 460) and memory bandwidth (159 MB/s vs ~87/115 on the 460), so even though the 460 has more sophisticated technology under the hood there will be some cases where the 285 pulls ahead. It's like...

Most onboard sound features built-in plug detection. The reduction in volume you hear is probably the sound hardware automatically adjusting to the specific electrical characteristics unique to headphones versus amps. That said, it's abnormal to experience volume issues with headphones on...

I would tend to agree with the DDR3 recommendations. 4 gigs is not terribly expensive and if you're going to spend the money upgrading anyway you might as well have some headroom.

Here's a little slideshow (fixed a few names that I'd misremembered while I was at it): FIC PT-2003 & Abit IT5H: Soyo 6BA+IV & Asus CUSL2: Asus P4B & P4P800: MSI-7236 & The Precious (GA-P55-USB3): In terms of visual appeal the last two are the clear winners. Hmm...fire...

Exactly. Clearly what I have now is the best I've ever had, but that isn't really the question, is it? Aha! I remembered the motherboard I used for that 2 GHz Northwood--the Asus P4C. It was ok but I got it mainly on brand strength rather than it being a really superior motherboard. The P4P800...

Well, there was the FIC-PT2003 I had back in 95 or 96. I started with a Pentium 75 in that, then graduated to a 133 which I overclocked to 166 with some rearrangement of jumpers. I made sure to order it with the pipelined burst cache slot populated for best performance. ;P That one will always...

I would definitely be more worried about hearing damage than speaker damage from high volumes.

I like how it shows the not-quite-linear relationship between core and memory clocks as they relate to final performance. I wish that the geometry of the graph could be illuminated to enhance the 3D effect--it would really bring the local maximums into focus.