BloodRedDragon

Hopefully not too fresh, but bad driver support isn't good.

I'm using Windows Firewall and IPSec filtering rules for bi-directional port blocking. Is this good use of free tools that come with XP for creating a bi-directional firewall, or is it nonsense? If you think it's nonsense, please explain.

This isn't like the grand ol' days of NT4.0 where there was an effort to see what apps/games would run on it, and if there were any fixes or workarounds for the ones that didn't. W2k was a major upgrade from NT4.0, and thus left plenty to talk about. XP's release followed close on the heals of W2k, and gave plenty more to talk about for its problems and being the first NT-based OS marketed to the masses. Now, XP is much improved, and, given Microsoft's track record with XP's initial release, Vista might very well be freshly released flatulence in 2007.

Just thinking out of the box here... With the second processor added, and the new video card that may well be pulling more power than the old one, perhaps the power supply might be coming a up a little short. Not that I've experienced a problem like this, but it may be worth testing if you have an extra one (preferably stronger) laying around, as strange things can happen when there isn't enough juice to keep things running properly.

This is what I've upgraded my computer with recently: 2.6Ghz P4 800Mhz FSB/Intel D875PBZ 2x Crucial 256MB PC3200 ECC memory (512MB total) 2x Seagate 7200.7 80GB 8MB cache SATA hd's in RAID-1 Not exactly blistering fast by todays standards, but its a screamer compared to the 1Ghz P3 it replaced. Very stable, too, which is what I was really looking for. Only downside that I noticed recently after perusing the Intel website for information about the Extreme and Prescott processors is that my mobo is one digit short on the revisions from being able to use them. That's okay, as I'll be using what I have for a while.

Well, my budget is prett tight, so even the sound card might wait a while. In relation to the video card upgrade, I'm definitely waiting for the release of Doom 3 to see how well the different cards fair with it.

Hopefully, there will be a sub-$200 budget conscious version of the 6800 later this year capable of spewing playable frame rates on Doom 3 at 1024x768 with everything maxed on the visual settings. For now, I'll save some money for an Audigy 2 ZS to replace my ancient PCI64 that's been hanging on since the glory days of Socket 7, while the 128MB GF4MX440-8X continues busting its balls to belt out playable frame rates in UT2004 demo with all the detail settings crank up along with 4x anti-aliasing at 1024x768.

There was a time when low CPU clock speeds and high utilization from non-DMA IDE drives made SCSI very attractive, even on a single user desktop system.

Originally posted by Tomay: Quote: Read this: http://www.dansdata.com/io031.htm Quote: SCSI super-drives aren't a good choice for desktop machines. A high-priced 15,000RPM SCSI hard drive may well load a big fat game slower than a commodity 7200RPM drive. This is because SCSI server drives top out at capacities well under 100Gb, while commodity drives with capacities well above 200Gb are commonly available. If you've got three times as much capacity, three times as much data passes under the heads per second. That triples your sustained transfer rate, all other things being equal (which they won't be - number of platters is a factor - but never mind that for now). A 15,000RPM 73Gb drive is only mechanically capable of 61% of the sustained transfer rate of an otherwise similar 7200RPM 250Gb drive. From all of the hard drive testing I've seen online, that theory doesn't hold water. There is, however, other things to keep in mind. If you go cheap and get an older version of a 10000/15000rpm SCSI drive, you may very well find that a current sata or ide 7200 rpm drive is faster. Also, from personal experience, the overhead (time-wise) of the SCSI bus seems to negate the effect of the faster access times of the drive unless its pushed hard (multiple I/O requests, especially among multiple drives - what SCSI is designed for). And there's always the noise factor with 10000/15000rpm drives.

You need to stick with the same type of ram(ECC registered). Something else to keep in mind is cas latency settings. For instance, if you have ram rated for cas2 and your computer is set for cas2, putting cas3 ram in it might cause problems and you would need to set your computer to cas3. Obviously, if you back off the timing like that, you'll slow down your computer a hair. K PS->I've been able to use different brands of ram together. The biggest concern is making sure they have the same specs.

I have Fury 3, and it does run on W2k and XP, but it sucks. But you need to keep things in perspective with the original Win95 games, as they were as quirky as the operating system. K PS->Is there any OpenGL ports of Duke Nukem 3d?

I think Cynan was asking if it's terminated or not. Whether you have one drive or several drives on the chain, the last drive on the chain still needs to be teminated. Since you have only one drive on the chain, obviously you only terminate that drive. K

Running W2k Pro and XP Pro on dual p3 1ghz system with 768 MB ram and GeForce2 GTS. I have sp2 installed on W2k and 23.11 detonator on both os's along with the same Via agp driver. I've tried Quake 3 Arena with the latest patch and settings maxed, and my framerates on both os's are about the same. K

I'm looking for cpu coolers for 1 ghz p3's, something capable of keeping them cool enough for overclocking. Any recommendations? K

Quote: there will probably never be an end to this debate and personally i think those tests aren't fair when comparing materials simply due to the fact that the design of the heatsink itself plays a very important role. what would be interesting to see and end this debate is to see 2 heatsinks made of the exact same design with the exact same fans on the exact same testbed, with only one exception, the material, one being pure aluminum while the other being pure copper. that would definetly end this debate. This is very true. The variations in the design of the heatsinks and the fans used make it impossible to truely compare the materials. Also, your idea is good, but it probably wouldn't end the debate. It's likely one design would not effect both materials equally, and that could unfairly bias the results toward one type of material. K

I'm running 21.83 on XP with dual p3's, Via chipset and Geforce2. Might switch to 23.11 soon, since Win2000 is running rock solid on it. K

The problem I have is with the heatsink on my first cpu. It's cocked, and I think it's because I busted the clip, namely the light colored lever. Obviously, when the lever is down, it helps distribute the pressure evenly against the heatsink. It was even the first time I installed it, but I somehow managed to break the lever in the process of transfering to the new motherboard. Does Intel sell them seperately? I have two 50mm fans attached to the case now for extra cooling. Just need to hook them up electrically. Also set-up 4-bay scsi tower and loaded it with my cdrom drives, and stuffed an ide cdrom drive in the computer, thereby replacing the two drives that were in it. Still have one drivebay left open now for another device. Ditched my pci slot wasting SB PCI64 soundcard in favor of the onboard sound of the mobo. Eventually I will get an Audigy when I can add it to my budget. K PS->As a machinist, I have to vouch for alluminum as a better heatsink. The only way copper can be a good heatsink is with a well cooled case. The problem is with copper being denser material, and therefore maintaining a temperature. The copper heatsink will draw the heat off the cpu faster when it's cold, but once it's hot the cooling effectiveness will drop because it can't dissapate the heat into the air fast enough. Alluminum is poor at maintaining temperature because of its low density, but it dissapates heat way better than copper. As a result, the cpu temperature will probably climb faster with an alluminum heatsink, but will stay reasonably cool for a longer operating duration than with a copper heatsink due to the copper will eventually heat up and lose it's cooling effectiveness. Still, it's somewhat dependent on case cooling. If you can keep the the copper heatsink cool, it might not be so bad. I'd like to see a test done on heatsinks after running them for 12 hours or more while the cpu is busy running Quake 3. That would be a more realistic test in keeping with what you really need the heatsink for. Also, a copper heatsink with alluminum fins could be worse due to the fact that the manufacturing process that attaches the alluminum to the copper needs to maintain good surface to surface contact between the two materials. Who needs to worry about another surface contact point issue when we already have one with the cpu and heatsink?

Check this site to see if this is the card you have. http://www.hightech.com.hk/html/988-1.htm It doesn't appear to be a 3dfx based card. The website has a drivers link. Supposedly, the card should work for OpenGL. If new drivers don't help, maybe the hardware is just not up to the task. In that case, you would need to get a new video card, for which I refer you back to AlecStaar's suggestion. Karl

That GLsetup.exe you were trying to use would have been useless, anyway. It's a software solution for video cards without OpenGL drivers, and is useless for games because it uses the cpu for the graphics acceleration. You need OpenGL drivers for the video card, which allows the gpu to do the graphics acceleration.

I've been trying to get Quake 3 to work in SMP mode since upgrading to two processors, but the game insists on crashing(usually before it even gets to the menu. I use the latest NVidia detonator drivers for the video card, which is a GF2 GTS(Elsa Gladiac). The game is patched to the latest version. Any ideas?

SMP does appear to need more work. However, it seems to scale well with faster video cards, considering the difference between my GF2 and DosFreak's GF3. I use the timedemo command to do the demo test, then check on the command console when it's done. "Timedemo 1" turns it on, and "timedemo 0" turns it off. Don't know about the showfps, but I imagine something could be found at Quakeworld.com. Haven't seen any benchmarks for patch 1.30, either. Karl

Yes, it did slow down with smp enabled, although it seemed to favor lower resolutions. This seems to be in keeping with what DosFreak posted, although my weaker GF2 apparently brings smp's stronger showings at much lower resolutions. Only deviation is on 2x FSAA where at 640x480 smp drops about 20%, 800x600 up to 30% drop, then back to a 20% drop at 1024x768. I will do some more testing at more resolutions, maybe include 4x FSAA to see what it does. Karl

My first exposure to accelerated 3d graphics was with a NVidia Riva128, and I was hooked immediately. I got NT4 so I could play GLQuake before NVidia released OpenGL drivers for Win95, and was immediately hooked on NT's stability. Running a GeForce 2 GTS now. NVidia cards aren't the only ones I played with, though. Here's a list. Matrox M3D Voodoo2 12MB Voodoo Banshee Matrox G200 Voodoo3 3000 Voodoo3 3500 TV AGP

Well, it looks like we both got lucky tonight, Alec. I, too, got Quake3 running in SMP mode in Windows 2000. But I didn't change the video drivers(currently Detonator version 23.10). Instead, I installed Via AGP driver version 4.10, which I hadn't done before(just used whatever Win2000 installed during set-up). Not only did this fix the smp mode problems, but it gave a dramatic frame rate improvement. DirectX version 8.1 is also installed, but this has been in place the whole time I've been trying to get Q3 SMP working. Before I give frame rates, I should mention all the graphics settings in Q3 are maxed. The map is FOUR.DM_66. My GeForce 2 GTS is overclocked to 215 mhz core/375 mhz memory, and Anisotropic Filtering is turned on. Prior to the Via AGP driver install, the frame rates at 1024x768 were 60 fps, and 13 fps with 2x FSAA(unplayable). With the Via AGP driver, here are my results with no FSAA: r_smp/0/1 640X480/101/103 800x600/95/79 1024x768/75/55 With 2x FSAA: r_smp/0/1 640x480/70/57 800x600/46/32 1024x768/26/21 (playable, though it tires the eyes) I need a GeForce 3. Karl

BloodRedDragon's SMP-RIG SPECS BloodRedDragon's Windows²ººº/XP Pro Machine (Full multimedia in the works): MotherBoard, CPU, Ram, Video, Monitor: ------------------------------------------------------ * Dual Pentium III 1ghz * MBI motherboard from CompUSA w/VIA chipset ($80) * 768MB SDRAM PC-133 (cheapo stuff, doesn't like overclocking or CAS-2 timing) * Elsa Gladiac Geforce2 GTS 32MB overclocked to 215mhz core/375mhz memory * 17" NEC MultiSync XV17+ monitor 75hz refresh rate @32-bit "True-Color" 1024x768 Disks: ------------------------------------------------------ * 2 34GB Quantum Atlas 10k2's 10,000 rpm 8MB cache Ultra-160 scsi * IMB 4.3GB hd 7200 rpm 512k cache ultrawide scsi (limited back-up) * Ls-120 SuperCapacity 120mb Floppy IDE Mode 4 * Iomega ZipDrive 250mb EIDE Internal IDE Mode 4 * Pioneer DVD drive 10x DVD/32x CD scsi-2 * Teac CD-R drive 4x write/24x read scsi-2 * Tekram DC-390U3W Ultra160 dual channel scsi controller Sound & Multimedia: ------------------------------------------------------ * Soundblaster-PCI64 soundcard * Labtec LCS-600 speakers * Intel PC USB Camera * Pinnacle Systems DV500 (dual-stream editing w/digital and analog I/O) Input Devices: ------------------------------------------------------ * Logitech 3-button mouse PS-2 * Microsoft SideWinder Precision Pro USB * Keyboard 104 key (all that is left from the original Micron I started with) Telecommunications & Networking: ------------------------------------------------------ * LinkSys 10/100 USB network adapter * 3Com 56k USB FaxModem Print Subsystems & Scanners: ------------------------------------------------------ * Canon BJC-620 LPT1 * IBM scanner parrelel (haven't used it in a couple years) Cooling & Case + OS makeup: ------------------------------------------------------ * Enlight DeskTop Case (500watt power supply w/ 2 fans, 1 4" front case cooling fan, 1 drive bay cooling 3-fan cooling system)(will address the lack of adequate cooling soon, another limitation for overclocking) Windows²ººº Pro Service Pack #2/XP dual boot on NTFS5 File Systems Hope this helps. Karl