New PC :)

[Howard]

Well I have just finished building and setting up my new PC consisting of:

Asus P5B
Core2Duo 2.13 (E6420?)
2GB OCZ 800MHz RAM
Inno3d ichill 7900GS
Auzentech X-Plosion 7.1 DTS Connect soundcard


Now I'm a bit out of the loop with the "tweaking" and more "enthusiast" aspect So I'm hoping you lot can offer up a few tips and hints about how to get the best out of it, in terms of performance, I'm wanting to get back into gaming, but have no idea about modern games either! I'm gonna get hold of some and play them.


So two questions:

1. Recommend some games to play! I'm familiar with STALKER, Test Drive Unlimited, FEAR etc

2. Any optimisation tips? Am I ok with the drivers off the motherboard cd / Intel website? No tweaking to be had to maximise graphics performance etc? Latest Geforce drivers alright?

Certainly a damn sight quicker than my old machine though Although the fact that it hadn't had reformat since 2004 probably wasn't helping


Cheers

[Pob255]

Well a clean install does generally help So does a defrag after installing and updateing every thing.

If you want to try over clocking it a bit, check out Clunks core 2 duo oc guide.

Other than that, keep windows as clean as possible with minimum background crap running.
Then it's fiddleing and tweeking advanced options in each games options
You should be able to handel someing like Prey at 1280x1024 with everything at Max
If I remember correctly I get 47fps on prey with the hardwareOC benchmark but I'm not as obsessive as some people, I find any thing above about 24fps to be playable.

[zephod]

BIOS tweaks and ASUStools that you have available on the p5b platform are some of the best. Clunk's guide is good and I'd give that a read if I were you, and then manually set your ram timings to what you want, and set the fsb ratio of cpu:ram to 1:1, then just tweak the fsb straight up towards 400 (ddr2-800) and the system should handle it. After that, then you can fiddle it a bit to get best results.

As for the 7900GS, I o/c mine very succesfully using ATItool - plenty of settings to tweak, though you will probs only need the clock and ram sliders. It also includes an artifact scanning tool which I found to be pretty effective. Oh, and a temperature monitor, always handy .

[Howard]

Well I am impressed with the speed, but most of all the cooling..

Idle, each CPU core is sitting at 24C, the PC is virtually silent, the rear fan on the Antec PSU is (by design) not spinning, the 12CM fan at the rear is blowing out cold air, and I can feel cold air from the duct in the side of the case that reaches down towards the CPU fan.

None of this seems to change when I put it under load despite the CPU temp rising to about 40-45C !

Is the Asus QFAN thing designed to automatically vary the fan speeds when switched to "On" in the BIOS? It's that, or other modes such as quiet, not so quiet, performance, etc, lol.
The manual isn't very descriptive!

[Clunk]

Overclock the bugger

Click the guide in my sig, it was written for your motherboard

[zephod]

...and its very good.

Need to set the limits in Asus Qfan if you want it to auto control fan speeds via the mobo.