Upgrading my PC

[BaldEagl]

IIRC Asus uses the same chipset as the X-Fi's.  BTW, mine is the Xtreme Gamer Fatality Pro version.  I think it was about $140 when I got it.

[Chalenge]

Its possible there is one that is I guess but all that I have seen are using CMedia or Cirrus Logic.

EDIT: BaldEagl you have one of the better X-Fi chips that is far beyond the sub $100 cards. Your 3D positional capabilities are near the top of SBs capabilities and beyond even the Striker that I use. The one persistent problem with the X-Fi series (that you have not experienced yet) is the sudden appearance of failures. I mean like the card stops working and you have to reboot which works for a while and then there is total failure. I hope it never happens to you.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

UPDATE: Striker is limited to 44.1Khz and 48Khz in Vista or Windows 7 but 96Khz under XP.

ASUS Xonar can do 192Khz except the DS 7.1 is also a noisy card (107db SNR) versus the Xonar D2 (118db SNR) but unfortunately there isnt a good Win 7 driver yet (some people report it wont work at all with Win 7). Not sure about the D1 although at one point I was considering buying one.

Heheh anything over 100db SNR is excellent since the best of amplifiers barely reach that. If you manage to hear any noise at 100db SNR your input levels are grossly misadjusted.

Signal-to-noise ratio
>85 dB, wideband, unweighted, at maximum gain, referred to 2 V RMS

http://www.krellonline.com/s300i.html

[Masherbrum]

Krell, Lexicon and Bryston.........yummy.   

[Chalenge]

Heheh anything over 100db SNR is excellent since the best of amplifiers barely reach that. If you manage to hear any noise at 100db SNR your input levels are grossly misadjusted.

Except that these cards nevertheless make a lot of noise. Scratching interfering irritating noise that can and will destroy good speakers. In this case I believe they must have fudged the SNR numbers.

No thanks.

[Anodizer]

I'm thinking of upgrading my PC. Currently it is running Win XP, has a E6600 CPU O/C'd to 3ghz, a Asus P5W64-WS M/B, 2GB RAM, a GTX 260 video card and a RAID 0 HDD setup. This runs AH at 60FPS but can occasionally freeze up for a few secs, probably due to resource issues. Also it can be sluggish when working with some really big graphics files, particularly some of the files associated with the AH terrain editor.

So mainly I would like more memory, while faster HDD performance would be nice too. My thoughts are to get 4GB more RAM and an SSD drive of roughly 150GB. Also Windows 7, which is really required to make SSDs and that amount of memory work.

I was wondering if there was any brands of SSDs that you guys would recommend/avoid? I know to get something that supports the trim command in Win 7.

Also are there any problems about setting up the SSD as a partition in Win XP, installing Win 7 there and running a dual boot set up, at least to start with? It would be nice to have the security of having my old set up there in case anything went wrong with the installation. I would be prepared to format everything and start from scratch if that was better though.

I'm running something similar.. 
E6850(not over clocked)
Abit IP35 Pro Off Limits motherboard
EVGA GTX 260 (core 216)
2 gigs of Crucial Ballistix PC2 8500

I have a 120 mhz 22in LCD and it will play the game at 120 fps constantly.. 
All graphic options are at max except I only have shadows set at 1024 (smoothing and shadows on other players is also turned on)..  Anything above that kills the framerate..
Game resolution is set at 1680x1050..
You should be getting something similar..  E6600 not all that different from an E6850, and you're overclocked as well(so you're actually faster)..
Should be getting about the same as I'm getting, no??

Either way, The E8400 or even E8600 and some more RAM should put you where you want to be..  Good luck!

[guncrasher]

Not an expert but 2 more gigs of ram might help too.

Semp

[Chalenge]

Either way, The E8400 or even E8600 and some more RAM should put you where you want to be..  Good luck!

Unless they released a new BIOS in the last few days the E8600 wont work (this from the ASUS forums).

[Anodizer]

Unless they released a new BIOS in the last few days the E8600 wont work (this from the ASUS forums).

Copy that..  I have the same issue with my Ip35 Pro.. 
But the E6850 is doing a great job..  If I need more, I'll over clock both processor and
videocard..  When that doesn't work, time for i7 or whatever is the latest and greatest..

[Greebo]

My monitor only does 60 fps and the game runs at that even maxed out at 1920 by 1200. Since I turned down the clock rates on the video card I haven't had any more freezes, but I won't know for sure if its fixed for a few weeks.

The reason for the upgrade wasn't AH fps but getting some more memory for handling big graphics files. I could just stick 4 GB in to this PC but Win XP can only handle 3 GB max and that seems a bit of a waste. Going for Win 7 means reinstalling everything and if I'm going to go through all that hassle I figure I might as well upgrade the PC at the same time.

The other problem is the program I use for graphics work like skinning is Paint Shop Pro v7. This is not fully compatible with Win 7 and I don't like the newer versions. It may work better with the Win XP emulation mode in Win 7 Professional but as of yet I've not found anyone who has tried so I have no guarantee of that.

So right now I'm in two minds, I either get 4 GB RAM for this PC and live with XP wasting 1 GB of it or I go the i5/Win 7 route and hope PSP works OK. I've pretty much ruled out getting a new CPU, more memory and Win 7 for this MB though, seems like a bit of a dead end as this MB is not reliable with more than 4 GB RAM anyway.

[BaldEagl]

I have Paint Shop Pro 7 too and I used to run into that memory error occasionally.  There was a work-around for that but for the life of me I can't remember what it was.  Have you tried Googling it?  I've got it installed on all three of my machines and even my ancient laptop (PIII 650 w/256 Mb RAM) doesn't encounter that problem.  I really don't think it's a hardware issue.

[morfiend]

 Greebo,

  consider a dual boot system,add the extra ram,and a 64bit OS on top of your xp.

 Then the noncompatible programs can be run on xp and the ram will only be used as per XP but then run AH on the 64bit OS and have all the ram available to be used.


   

[Greebo]

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

At the time I didn't find any ideas on the web about the memory error other than increasing the swap file size, which didn't help in my case. I suspect the program is timing out trying to load this file, which IIRC is 16384 by 16384 pixels in size. With more than a couple of layers in the file it just crashes. On a small terrain it can be got round by cropping the file, working on the centre portion, saving as a single layer and then adding the cropped area back on. This won't work on a large terrain though.

Running a dual boot doesn't really help as XP still won't see more than 3 GB and I don't need the extra RAM for anything other than PSP. I'm guessing the same thing applies to Windows XP emulation mode under Win 7 as well. If 64 bit Win 7 is emulating 32 bit XP it will be emulating its memory issues too, so Win 7 will only help if I can get PSP to work under it natively. Some people have managed to make this work OK, others had issues, some can't get it to work at all. Most of the latter have been running the 64 bit version.

AH and everything else I use runs fine on this current system. Slowing down the video card has (so far) stopped the freezes. If they are still gone in a couple of weeks I will probably just get 4MB of RAM for this system and keep XP since there is no guarantee I'd be able to get PSP to work in Win 7.