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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pgerassi who wrote (256338)	9/26/2008 10:14:04 AM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Pete, Yeah, I recall reading about ATI cards allowing higher temps. That makes that easier to cool. I was experimenting a little last night, and what seems to be happening is that if I leave the fan speed on auto, the speed does flactuate, but the steps are not as large as when I set the fan speed manually, to, say 50%, it spikes to 100%. As I said, the steps on automatic fan speed are not as steep, but I don't see why in such an expensive card, they could not figure out (in card BIOS) to make fan speed changes gradual, linear, not stepwise. Some mobo BIOSes do that just fine... Another thing I am going to do is fiddle with the clock speeds. The game I am playing now (Europa Universalis III + the expansion packs) does not need a lot of horsepower to render things just fine even with much less powerful card. So what I am going to do is turn down the clock speed from 600 MHz to maybe 450 MHz. Looks like with this card, I will have to set up profiles for individual games... OTOH, I turned all the rendering goodies to max in Oblivion, and loaded some old save games, and it looks positively stunning - at cost of some fan noise... I tried booting into Vista 64, and everything works just fine. It seems that Vista is a lot more sensitive to graphics card / driver glitches than XP. When running with a broken nVidia card, XP just gave me all kind of artifacts and an occasional (rare) crash/freeze. Vista seems to be detecting all these problems and tries to unload / reload the driver to save itself from crashing, but eventually it does crash - not surprisingly, while running faulty hardware. Another thing, I am going to try to use Vista 64 for gaming. In XP, and with 1 GB graphics card, I lose 1 GB of 4 GB of system memory right off the bat. In Vista 64, all of the memory can be used for apps and caching. I really should transition everything to Vista 64, but I am too lazy. Joe