Human_Being

Manticore is officially back on the team. Since he left Cryptic for NCSoft, Positron was able to work out a transfer back to CoX after the buyout.

I believe Nvidia has abandoned support of the old PCI PhysX cards (yet another of their desperate "buy one of our newer cards, fanboy!" tactics of late). If you are running XP or Win 7 (but not Vista), I believe you can have two seperate set of graphics drivers installed at the same time. Until you find a more permanent solution, you might try doing that and using the newer drivers for the new game and the older, PhysX card-supporting drivers for CoX.

I *think* all of the 8xxx and newer series Nvidia processors are supposed to support PhysX acceleration (7xxxs do not). You also might try removing the PhysX card and reinstalling the new drivers to see if it will be enabled without the physical card in there for the installer to turn its nose up at.

The 9400 GT is below Positron's OP minimum of a 9500 GT. Will you be able to play Going Rogue? I'd be very surprised if you couldn't. Will you be able to play Going Rogue in graphical Ultra Mode? Poorly if at all with what we've been told so far.

Actually, you can have two different models of Nvidia card in your computer (like the tiny GT 220 with two GTX 260s) and the Graphics Drivers can be set to designate one of them as a "dedicated PhysX processor". It's like having one of the old add-in PhysX PCI cards, but faster and still market-available. With CoX I don't think it should do anything, but it matters for games like Batman Arkham Asylum.


As to the original question, if that beast doesn't run Ultra Mode, something is seriously wrong.

That's what I said; it's going to give solid performance.

Whoa there, Tex! Take a look at this first. This is what I meant about an adaptor.

Do read the reviews, there may be some fiddling for installation if there are large mosfet heatsinks nearby. But if it will work, $9 is less than $30. There's also another kit that Zalman offers, but I don't see it on Newegg's site yet. You might contact Zalman and ask about them both with your 9500.

Do you plan on buying a second GTX 275 to use in SLI? If you don't, you really don't need the second PCIe x16 slot - and the attendant price increase that comes with it. Was there some other feature you wanted that board for?

The single GTX 275 on a 23 inch monitor should probably handle whatever you're going to throw at for a good long while. Long enough it would be more cost effective to upgrade to a new generation card when the time comes.


The RAM's fine. Corsair works. However, *do* comparison shop with the RAM because the companies weekly try to cut each others' throats. Furthermore, if you don't want to spend the money for 1600 RAM, 1333 or even 1066 will do fine; the difference in performance is nominal. Also don't be too afraid to buy "naked" RAM without a heat spreader; the DDR3 RAM operates at much lower voltage than the older DDR2 RAM and doesn't heat up as much.


If you have 2 GB, you'll likely see the occasional framerate hickup with CoX as RAM fills up with textures and it starts having to use the HD page file. That should most often happen outside in zones where the environment is changing rapidly. You can also help manage it by using /unloadgfx to dump all but the textures the game is currently using from memory.

I don't know if that's going to interfere with your planned recording and I have no clue what impact it's going to have in "that other game" at all.


That's fine. Just...don't keep Editing right before I hit "submit", kay?


It looks a solid machine to me.

If you get a 5770, I'd go with a different brand than Powercolor. XFX, Sapphire, or something above the bargain-basement.

A "good Core 2 quad" will be around 2.66 GHz right now. For single/dual core-using applications like CoX, that will mean a *drop* in performance from your current 3 GHz dual core. The i5-750 is a 2.66 GHz quad that will automatically overclock itself to above 3 GHz when two or fewer cores are in use (staying inside its thermal design specs). It also has a newer architecture and slightly better performance per clock cycle than the Core 2s.

The difference in price between a 2.66 GHz Core 2 quad and the i5-750 is $20. You get the speed of a high end dual core when you need it and the flexibility and performance of a high end quad core when you need it.

Above the i5-750 you have the i7-860 and 870 for much more money that have a slightly higher base clock and the ability to engage hyperthreading to treat each of their four cores as two virtual cores (8 total). The i5-750 is a quality workhorse, not a status symbol.

You have two possible bottlenecks there. Once is HD write speed. The other is processor availability. A quad would give you more real estate for the latter and I have no idea if the former is actually a problem for you.

Well, that's kind of all you need to look for atm, I think. You've got a separate sound card, so you don't need the integrated sound. You didn't mention anything about legacy firewire-based components you need to accommodate. You don't have a RAID array you need to feed with a set number of SATA connectors. The Socket 1156 boards absorbs most of the old Chipset functions into the processor so the only variant for i5-750 is the P55/P55A* chipset. ...Beyond number of PCIe x16 slots for single/multiple graphics cards that's sort of all the different selling points of motherboards obviated right there. As to brands, people seem to generally like Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI.


Stop it with the edits >.<.

Wow, video capture cards: blast from the past! I remember a friend being all excited about getting one of those in 1994.

Most game-video recording is done now with Fraps software. You can try it on the machine you have now.


(*P55A gives USB 3.0 capability and SATA 6 Gb/Sec, but uses half of the available PCIe lanes otherwise used for the graphics card to enable it.)

The information we have so far hints strongly towards CoX GR being more GPU dependent then CPU dependent. That GTX 275 should handle GR Ultra Mode just fine according to Positron's post in the Ultra Mode Shopping Guide thread. Positron just mentioned pairing the graphics card with a "decent" CPU. Unless you're bound and determined to upgrade for that unstated other game, I'd stand pat for now.

You should see dramatically better than 15 fps.

Not...exactly the kind of business I'd expect Nvidia to want as their high-profile core market. I guess that's better than announcing a new defeat though, since their Oakridge National Labs contract for a Fermi-based supercomputer fell through.

If it eventually moves beyond the luxury car market, and Nvidia can hold onto the deal, that might actually be really good for them since Volkswagon bought Toyota recently.

I didn't see anything about Fermi in that article. Are they saving that for another presentation?


Wait, what?

Likely you're going to get the occasional hickup in framerate when available ram is full and the system has to use the HD swap file to move graphics textures around. You might be able to manage that some by using the /unloadgfx command to dump everything but the textures the game is immediately using. Just standing there looking at the game, you're not going to see any downgrade in appearance.

Do remember to look through Bill Z Bubba's ATI issues sticky thread. You'll want to set AA to run through the driver menu rather than have CoX handle it and disable water effects. All of that will go away when GR hits though, and the 5770 will stand you in much better stead for the future than a current Nvidia card will.

The nForce 7xx chipsets were supposed to have HD corruption issues of some sort. I don't know whether they ever fixed the issue in BIOS, but Nvidia no longer makes them. I don't see another motherboard option on their website either. I tried poking around to see if they had another motherboard option in one of their other lines, but the only one I found was an even older G41/ICH7 board in their dual core configurator. That makes me think they aren't buying Socket 775 boards anymore and are just offering what they have in stock that didn't sell before.

The 5770 only wants a minimum 500 W power supply, so you could knock a few dollars off of there.

The ATI 5770 will give you full settings in CoX currently, and is likely to give you Ultra Mode in GR at *some* resolution. The 5770 is roughly equivalent to the (more expensive) GTX 260, which is in the middle of Positron's spectrum from the Ultra Mode Shopping Guide thread.


Piddling around on their site attempting to find a different motherboard, I found that you could get a $971 i5-750 based system with much the same components:

Case ( NZXT Lexa Blackline Gaming Tower Case - w/ Blue Light )
Processor ( Intel® Core™ i5 750 Processor (4x 2.66GHz/8MB L3 Cache) )
Processor Cooling ( [Free Upgrade] Liquid CPU Cooling System w/ 120mm Radiator [SOCKET-1156] )
Memory ( 4 GB [2 GB X2] DDR3-1333 Memory Module - Corsair or Major Brand )
Video Card ( ATI Radeon HD 5770 - 1GB - Single Card )
Video Card Brand ( Major Brand Powered by ATI or NVIDIA )
Motherboard ( ASUS P7P55D LE -- Intel P55 Chipset CrossFire Supported w/7.1 Sound, Dual-Channel DDR3, Gb LAN, S-ATA Raid, USB 2.0, Dual PCI-Ex16 MB )
Power Supply ( 550 Watt -- Power Supply )
Primary Hard Drive ( 500 GB HARD DRIVE -- 16M Cache, 7200 RPM, 3.0Gb/s - Single Drive )
Optical Drive ( 22X Dual Format/Double Layer DVD±R/±RW + CD-R/RW Drive - Black )
2nd Optical Drive ( None )
Sound Card ( 3D Premium Surround Sound Onboard )
Network Card ( Onboard LAN Network (Gb or 10/100) )
Operating System ( Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium + [Free 60-Day !!!] Microsoft Office 2007(Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access ....) - 64-Bit )
Warranty ( Standard Warranty Service - Standard 3-Year Limited Warranty + Lifetime Technical Support )

That's $83 over your stated budget, but the i5-750 is a noticeable upgrade from the older chips and would give you a current-design motherboard and RAM rather than one that uses a socket type that isn't developed-for any longer. You might try looking in that configurator to see if there's something you like better than what you have ordered now.

Well, you kind of can't for that price. The reason being that you not only need to upgrade the processor and motherboard, you'll also need new DDR3 RAM for one of the new chips. You could buy a low-ball CPU and maybe squeeze everything into that price, but it would be with another socket LGA 775 chip and wouldn't be much/any of an "upgrade".

If you're willing to spend a bit more, the i5-750 is a $200 processor that does most of what the i7s do, with the exception of the hyper-threading capability that gives you 8 virtual cores on 4 physical ones. If you're not going to have any applications that require 8 cores, the i5-750 is probably your best value/price compromise. Below the i5-750 you start to get into dual cores with an on-chip GPU that is barely enough to push spreadsheets around a screen.

The older E8500 3.16 GHz dual core and Q9400 2.66 GHz quad core both cost $180. The i5-750 has a base clock speed of 2.66 GHz, but when two or fewer cores are in use it will overclock itself to above 3 GHz. On top of that, it has better power-management capabilities than the older Core 2 chips. So you get all the flexibility of the Q9400 with all of the potential speed of the E8500 in one chip.


You could fit the chip on an MSI P55-CD53 for $115. If you used this you wouldn't be able to do SLI or Crossfire, but it doesn't sound like you intend that anyway. A more substantial Socket 1156 motherboard with be somewhere north of $130.


With those two bits you'll want 4 GB of DDR3 1066 or 1333 RAM, which will cost you another ~$100.


So you could fit a processor and motherboard into your budget, keeping your old RAM, but it would be one of the older Core 2 chips.

Then there's people like Walter Bell, who had a thirty-five year career as an elephant hunter up to 1930. He shot over 1,000 elephants in that time, most with 6.7 mm, 160 grain bullets.

The thread's gone on a slight tangent here, but if anyone's interested in this kind of historical big game hunting, I'd recommend searching up a copy of Peter Hathaway Capstick's Death in the Silent Places or Death in the Long Grass. The former is about larger-than-life hunters of the 1800s and 1900s. The latter is about the big game animals themselves and smaller but still lethal creatures that would be encountered with them; it has chapters with titles like "Leopard", "Cape Buffalo", and "Crocodile".

Capstick himself was a professional African hunter and the books are very well written; showing evidence of someone who spent years telling stories around a campfire for entertainment.

It is and it isn't. It's got some fairly serious design limitations (like a given section being "one use"), but for what it does do it's a very cheap way of upgrading the armor on an existing tank. A lot of the old T-72s still in service in Eastern Europe are now coated in blocks of the stuff. The new T-90s in Russia come factory equipped with it. And I believe the US Marine Corp's M60s were covered in it during Desert Storm.