Just ordered a new graphics card, I had it up to here with my wobbly freezes. I'm still not a 100% sure it's graphics-related, but have a look in the Shogun 2 thread for some insight.

I went with an Nvidia card - for the first time in my life, believe it or not. I present to you, the GTX 560 Ti.

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?o ... itstart=18

Just skip to the final remarks and score, part of that review page is overclocking nerd BS about how cool the card looks, who the fuck cares.

Tom's Hardware benchmarks show it doing well in the mid-to-upper-tier range, with some variation depending on the manufacturer. Shouldn't be too long before I get the card and give it a spin. Let's hope this puts my lame-ass problems to rest (and allows me to play me some awesome games for a long time in the future). Shogun 2 ran like shit on 'high' without AA or too much fancy shit turned on, so I was due for an upgrade anyway.

awesome.. glad you bit the bullet on a new card. I'm looking forward to seeing how your box performs.

Hehe, thanks. Yeah kinda curious how (and if) my CPU will bottleneck it too. It's a decent dual core Intel CPU so I don't suspect it will too much, and most games are much, much more heavy on GPU than on CPU anyways so...and my 4 gigs of ram aren't exactly antiquated yet. Should be fine. If it comes with a bechmarking program I'll put it to the test, we'll see. Pretty sure it won't outperform your pc. What are your specs again? I mean GPU, CPU, Ram?

i've got a core i7 920, gtx 465 and 16gb of ram.

Coolio. Isn't 16 gigs of ram going a little overboard though? I mean, I know ram is fairly cheap but I would think the performance payoffwould be minimal. 8, though, I see myself try.

Y'know, that's wrong. I have 18GB of ram, not 16.

The reason is I have triple-channel DDR3, so I have to buy in sets of 3 to take full advantage of hte memory controllers. I started off with 6GB, but that's not really enough for hard-core computing under Win7. So I wanted to buy another set of RAM. My choices were basically 6GB or 12GB, so I went for 12GB.

At the time I was thinking about creating a RAM drive to put cache stuff on, but I didn't realize at the time what that would do to my boot time. I undid that and now have 18GB of RAM. I may re-implement the RAM drive though... a 10GB RAM drive used to hold IE cache, system paging file and temp files makes sense, even if it makes my boot times last several minutes.

In case of curiosity, the boot times isn't because of the RAM, it's because for a RAM drive to be useful, it has to be formatted and stuff. A fix for that is to store an image of it that just gets cloned onto the RAM drive every time the PC boots up. However, the cloning process takes a really long time.

So basically it's only worth it if you know how to put it to use? Kinda like being smart doesn't get you far if you don't actually learn anything.

Quick question: I just installed my card and the drivers that come with it (CD) and so far it looks good. However, when I go to the MSI drivers page it gives me the following options for my card: XP 32 bit and 64 bit and Windows 7 32 and 64 bit. The fuck? Where's vista?

Would you say vista is more like XP or Windows 7? I'm thinking the latter, but what do I know. I'm on 64 bit btw.

I just had a looksie in the driver folders of the install cd and it had folders named "windows7_vista32" and 64. So yeah, going with Windows 7. Still kinda confusing though. It's like they're telling me to get off this crappy OS.

Windows 7 has more users than Vista and has for many months. Win7 is actually going to surpass the number of XP installs out there this month, according to some survey or other.

Well, a quick google shows it actually has surpassed it, according to one report:
http://rcpmag.com/articles/2011/04/12/r ... in-us.aspx

Anyway, Vista and Windows 7 are virtually the same. Vista was a very serious rewrite and upgrade from XP... 7 just tuned it and made some other changes. So you can pretty safely use Win7 drivers on Vista. I presume you already know the difference between x86 and x64.

BTW, downloading drivers from the manufacturer's site is what noobs do. You should get your drivers from nvidia directly. The manufacturers typically lag behind by unacceptable amounts of time.

Thanks for the protip

I always did so in the past, but I was lured to MSI's site with promises of an autoupdating tool, which turned out to be for 32-bit systems only.

Anwyay, I installed the latest drivers, played 3 hours of Shogun 2 without crashes and then an hour of MoW without crashes. Looks like it was the card all right (thank god). I'm also surprised at how quiet this thing is, for having two fans. It's pretty pimp performance-wise too: my previous card would have lag even in the main menu with settings on 'high', this one takes on 'very high' without even breaking a sweat. Maybe I should do a benchmarking test some time.

Should be ready for The Witcher 2 now

good deal, glad you're up and running. Nothing worse than a gamer that can't game.

What's the resolution on your display?

1680x1050!

What's yours anyway? i'm sure Satis' is something inhumanly large.

Mine's 1920x1200. It used to be 1680x1050, but I got a new one.