it looks indeed like the graohics card is malfunctioning.
But i really don't have an explanation why you are struggling with ati-drivers. Just teh same as some people are claiming nvidia is shit.... something wrong about what or how you install in windows. Hard to tell.

Anyway, to increase performance:
RAM : 2x 1GB Team Dark + 1x 2GB AMICRO (3GB visible to WinXP x86)GPU : Zotac GTX 295 1792MB

Try to get your memory config balanced, most motherboards have dual channel memory configs so you need to place your memory in pairs. There is a remote change this memory is causing your troubles.
So this would mean adding another 1x2Gbyte AMICRO module which must be exaclty the same as you already have. And make sure the same type of memory is placed per channel. AND try keep memory modules the same over all channels. Different speed and timings means you always have to configure your bios to use the specifications of the slowest dimm. It is only ok to have different memory sizes although that is not optimal performance wise. Also some memory-modules require different voltage settings which will make it nearly impossible to get a stable config. Mixing memory brands is not so good idea even on different channels. It might work flawless... or it might not work...

btw: team dark?? Amicro? i don't know this memory manufactures?? What is their reputation?? How good is it? is it cheap?

Last edited by Bluebird B B, Sun 13 Dec 2009, 11:41.

I to think it is a good idea to remove the chicane and so creating an additional layout. I think it will not take much effort to create it.

BL-gp can become more fun with the downforce cars, any car since i don't like this chicane, just as most chicanes in lfs, need serious improvements.

On response top original question,
you can als get a ati 4650 card, but you might be very cpu limited. two months ago i gave away a lot faster system to friends for nothing...3500+, low latency ddr2 400Mhz with proper dual channel, 4x512mb.

So if you upgrade try also to get bot channels working/balanced. It will require an extra 1gbyte dimm or the removal of 1gbyte dimm.


But what ever you do, it is very costly to make an old system perform like current systems. Better to start saving money and do a major upgrade. If lfs is all that matters... a complete system can be built that will cost about €600 which will be able to run lfs with all settings maxed out with 32 racers in view.

Last edited by Bluebird B B, Sat 5 Dec 2009, 23:43.

Quote from J.B. :

For that matter, does anyone know if Massa is doing his karting event again this year? Was quite good the last two years, definitely more fun than the silly RoC stadium events.

Eurosport 2, today 1900 CET.
Tomorrow 1400.

Quali 1
Quali 2

Maybe worth a new thread?

Systems looks very good for lfs. Only the power-supply is a bit weak. Would be better to get a good 500 watt psu for more power-reserve.

Quote from CSU1 :

I have my home server in it's new place and the room itself is small and almost air tight.I also have an aircon setup that pulls fresh air from outside, al is well and is a nice neat job. I am wondering about the very basic of air conditioning, atm the room is being filled with fresh air from the outside but I imagine over time I might run into problems with high levels of water in the air so am I to blow air out of the room or suck it in???

For just one system, it might be a lot cheaper to just openup somewere and place a fan to suck air from outside into the room. Do they same thing somewhere high in the room, but this time sucking air out of the small room.

It saves a LOT of money just having two 20cm fans instead of a airco running 24x7.

Quote from gezmoor :

This review might be of interest.

http://www.itpro.co.uk/611308/ ... -256gb-ssd-drive-review/2

Would seem that whilst technically there is a significant performance advantage for SSD in real world tests the difference isn't so big.

I'm not sure what the conventional hdd is the are comparing with. Usually its 5400 rpm or less which is usual for laptops, making this benchmark looking extra good for the ssd. Ssd's use also a lot less energy than normal disks. BUT with a complete system configuration, the difference is minimal. Normal desktop systems have 7200rpm and for the bootdisk it is possible to get 10K sata disk for less than half the price of a ssd. 15K disks are available too for years now, but they are not designed for desktop market and use only sas interfaces.

ssd' s are faster than conventional disks, but is it really worth the money to get windows boot faster? Unless you are on unlimited budget, the money is better spent on: cpu, memory, graphics card etc. I do recommend though not to buy a green-editions hdd's etc. Those energy saving models are a bit slower compared to regular 7200rpm disks for pc-systems. But the gained energy saving on a total system config is very small.

The harddisk is currently still the slowest part, but conventional disks have become faster too over the years AND microsoft windows vista/win7 with its pre-loading policy's makes loading of apps really fast. Starting a game which i didn't play for a long time, starts within a few seconds. call of duty 2, starts within 2 seconds, most of the time is spent by the game for detection of the hardware, disk is not 100% loaded while starting up cod2. MW2 starts within seconds, lfs within one second, firefox within one second. I have huge problems playing btf2 online however.. i kicked out on every map change, because my system loads the map faster than the server-side...
Openoffice first time start is really slow though, it takes a whopping 4 to 5 seconds to open openoffice-writer. Second time starting it takes less than one second. A SSD disk will most likely reduce these load times by about 25-40%, but best case these will be about 2 seconds and windows booting in about half the time.

For certain audio/video/photo applications it might be different. Also small databases will perform a lot better on a ssd, when using hardware designed for desktop systems. Remember right now, ssd is still 5 tot 10 times more expensive per Gbyte than conventional disks which are not really that slow. Adding more memory boosts overall system performance and makes you suffer even less from the high latency's of conventional disks.

So is it really worth your money to buy ssd just to get windows boot faster? I think not but... if you really get angry of waiting 45 seconds waiting for windows to boot after you have installed all your programs etc... than ssd will help you
You should not buy a ssd, if the consequence is you cannot afford anymore to buy at least 8gbyte of memory or have to start downgrading the graphicscard, cpu, memory with worse timings etc.

In the meantime, i wil too keep an eye on the prices of ssd' s. In the last 4 years nothing has changed though on ssd pricing compared to conventional disks but the performance of cheap ssd's are really improving over the last two years and ssd uses less energy. So maybe sometime in the future.....

Last edited by Bluebird B B, Sun 22 Nov 2009, 07:49.

Quote from Jakg :

It's anywhere between 2.75 - 3.5 GB on a 32-bit Windows OS. You can use PAE to give it more but thats.. dodgy.

x64 Windows OS' can see a lot more, but it depends on the OS in question.

Running 8GB ATM in 7 x64 and it's seeing it all (although 8GB of RAM is the most pointless thing ever I have to say...!)

vista/win7 is finally taking advantage of the extra memory for pre-loading applications and file-caching. The extra memory makes windows
look and feel a lot faster. The catch is, you should not mind windows being active on the disk for several minutes after booting. It does not affect what you are doing except if you are running benchmarks which will be 1-3% slower. But your apps will often start instantly like coming from a ram-disk. So there is not a direct visible benefit in having 8gbyte or more ram, but it makes working on a wintendo system really a bit better.

My rig:
built july 2009:
- CPU: amd phenom [email protected] (max is 3.71Ghz)
- system-board: asus M4a78T-E
- memory: 4x2gbyte corsair 1600Mhz@1333Mhz and 6-6-6-8-22-5-20-5 timings and 1,85volts
- graphics-card: club ati 5870
- soundcard: creative X-fi sound card , extreme gamer edition or something like that
- networkcard:intel pro/1000 GT
- HDD1: Western Digital RE3 Enterprise 500GB (WD5002ABYS)
- HDD2: WD Caviar Black 1TB (WD1001FALS)
- systemcase: Lian Li PC-7B with fans replaced with Enermax UC-12AEBS"warp" fans, sidepanel modded and has a antec bigboy fan20cm. However, the mod turned out to be complete useless. System did not get cooler. Topfan replaced with Enermax UC-9FAB-B, 9x9 casefan
- cpu cooler: zalman CNPS9700NT
- powersupply: Zalman ZM750-HP
- monitor: LG W2600HP

Edit: Again, finally have a ati 5870 card now

Last edited by Bluebird B B, Fri 11 Dec 2009, 20:29. Reason : a zero too many

Enzo steers in without looking and totally missed the car in his mirrors entering blindspot. So indeed, "ER enzo" is the crash driver in this case.

Being slightly ahead is NOT an excuse to steer in like there is nobody else on track. Really typical accident which causes lots of frustration, because some drivers really think everybody should move out of their way.

Also notice Time Schrick, on t1 one grrr typical maneuver causing lots of frustration. THAT is what i think what should be called dive-bombing into an corner.

Last edited by Bluebird B B, Fri 20 Nov 2009, 16:52.

Quote from smurfer :

Maybe this article could clarify some aspects:

OSNews, Win 7 kernel

smurfer, still using wine...

hm very limited, some talk abut microsoft finally also got familiar with spinlocks etc. Indeed database-systems will go to complete halt with many users if this is not implemented.

Interesting, the claimed performance increase is at least on desktop market totally non-existent. That is win7 is often just a bit slower than vista. win7 is claimed to boot faster, by many ,than vista , it does not. It is claimed to perform better, in game-benchmarks, win7 is usually slower.

Please take note of the following very interesting sentence:
"Windows Vista, which simply didn't perform very well, especially in its early days."

Looks like vista users can be very happy microsoft decided not to artificially keep the improvements away from vista

Quote from NitroNitrous :

Do you know the story about Windows Vista? Microsoft wanted to replace Windows XP, so they started to work on it. After some years, they realised the project was taking more time than expected. People was tired of XP so they needed something new. Then someone had a great idea: pack everything we have done until now, call it Windows Vista and sell it while we keep working. Finally that project has been finished, and it is called Windows 7.
So, basically, Windows 7 is the finished version of Windows Vista and that's why most people complain about Vista but they like 7.

You are not naming anything at all why windows7 would be any different to vista if you look behind the gui. Just stating windows7 is out-of-the-box more up-to-date than a two year OS. Well duh.. the two-year-old version needs to be updated to get it to the current standard. Some big unix-vendors do this all the time, releasing new install-media with updated OS out-of-the-box. Only difference is, they do not claim to be releasing a new operating-system. But microsoft is, successfully, doing exactly that


edit: About directx11 questions, YES i have directx11 but not yet a directx11 card. Just as it is not necessary to have directx11 capable graphics card to install windows 7.

Last edited by Bluebird B B, Wed 18 Nov 2009, 07:39.

Quote from Bose321 :

I bet you don't even have a ATi HD5000 series.

Not yet, planning to buy a 5870 card in about two weeks. I still have a bit doubt if i might go for a 5970 card. I don't think i would really benifit from the added performance. Making the price/performance ratio for me not very good while a 5870 is relatively cheap.

@obsolum

actually, it is vista that boots faster then win7, stability is unlikely to be different since the kernel, drivers etc. are exactly the same. Al crashes i got were related to too much overclocking and hardware(memory) not being able to work at rated specifications. I did try to reduce memory usage of vista, but it resulted in less performance. Since with vista, microsoft finally is using free memory efficiently for disk caching and pre-loading applications you often use. I doubt win7 is doing it differently, it might just be reporting memory usage differently. Vista/win7 really start to work well with 4+gbyte of memory because of that.
At the desktop, 1.65gbyte of memory is allocated with lots of programs and background services and 6gbyte is used for diskcaching, making my games start really, really fast. Lfs is loaded within one second. I doubt it can be done any quicker on the same hardware.

My point is, people are shouting win7 better this, that...but actually its all the same.

I do not deny the user interface of win7 is better than vista out of the box. But it is really just the userinterface.
Get vista, update it and tweak the gui to your liking and voila it works exactly as well as windows 7. So f you already have vista running and the gui tweaked, i do not think there is any advantage in upgrading. There is one though, your bankaccount will be lowered by 60 to 100 euros. BUT... in this case, your money will be better spent on two games, a concert of a great artist, new disk, clothes etc. to name a few examples.

note: using vista 64 bit since 11-2007

(one last note, i really hate microsoft, and i really hate it i have to run microsoft windows operating system. As long as microsoft has a monopoly on desktop market, i try not to get angry about it since its a waste of energy)

Last edited by Bluebird B B, Tue 17 Nov 2009, 13:26.

Quote from Bose321 :

It's not the same. It just looks the same, they did that because vista looked good. Seven also RUNS great. And has DX11 .

My current directx version is 11, i updated it to directx 11 before windows7 was released LOL

Quote from tristancliffe :

Because Vista was awful, slow, clunky and intrusive, whereas 7 is actually pretty good, it feels a lot quicker (even if it actually isn't), intuitive and barely ever intrusive.

Sure, the underlying kernal might be similar/identical, but so what? Plenty of cars share the same floorpan and end up totally different to drive.

Not a really wel argumented post.
turnoff uac and vista and you're 90% on your way into making it really usefull. People like to forget many, many users demanded protection against themselves from microsft, that's why the awfull uac was introduced.

If you already own vista, you know what to do.
With windows7 you just get vista with a tweaked gui. Vista got blamed for being slow, but tests show windows7 is usually exaclty as fast and sometimes just a bit slower than vista.
Ugly? Did you take a good look at xp? Totally teletubby's look after default install. But people are just used to it. xp, vista and win7 need tweaking to get the gui/look and feel working like you want it yourself.

you comparision with cars is a bit odd thought, on a car you get lots of different parts making it often different to drive.

Try again, name me some real advantages of win7 over vista, not in terms of awfull, ugly etc.

i can name one: after default install there is less gui tweaking needed in win7 which saves time. But is that really enough to spent money to migrate from vista to win7? I personally rarely have to reinstall windows. Average is at least 3-4 years and by that time the systems are outdated, sold of given to friends. So i would be spending time and money for ... what? What is the advantage over vista? What can i do better in win7 than in vista?

Quote from Scawen :

If you have Windows 7 64 bit please just click Windows 7.

I included XP x64 because I am told that wasn't really XP, but this is not the case with 64 bit Vista and 7.

I assume lfs won't be available in 64-bit version anytime soon?

edit:
Curious why some people want to move from vista to win7. Its exactly the same operating system, but the gui and frontend has been tweaked in win7 that' s all;vista+updates=win7. Just like W2K and XP, but the difference in case of vista/win7 is even smaller. So why move to win7 and spent money for a new license? What is the big advantage in it?

Last edited by Bluebird B B, Tue 17 Nov 2009, 10:51.

Quote from JasonJ :

The hyperlinks should take you to a 1920x1080 screenshot on imageshack. Try clicking the thumbnails, here's one of them: http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/5282/cromo.jpg
WTF, it's now a AVON bridge.. haha

Thanks for all the tips.
- weird power-management
Antec 500W ~12 months old
dedicated 6pin rail connector and using another separate rail for the other 6 pin GPU power.
- overheating cpu
39 degrees idle, e8400 runs so cool i love it.
- firmware version motherboard
original not flashed *
- virus/spyware
- anti-virus/anti spyware
fresh winXP install (new)
- drivers chipset, soundcard, networkinterface
granted, i could try later drivers for Mainboard *
- accidentally onboard graphics card enabled("hybride mode")
no onboard GPU (Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3R)
- check event viewer(eventvwr) windows
no application problems, nothing else is installed except Logitech profiler for G25
- directx version
9.0c(4.09.0000.0904) included in WinSP2 disk, SP3 installed
- Install vista/7 64 bits If you have a license for it
I have win7 in the mail to test with soon *

*Yes a couple things to try. Thanks. But I sorta have my doubts. The strange thing is when I use CCC to make changes to AA and AF a lot of the time, LFS just ignores what I put into CCC. It works the first time i go to full screen, but if I use Shift-F4 to window out and go back to full screen, the AA settings from CCC are just lost and LFS shows up looking with 0xAA and yes, it is set to forced 8x in CCC. So I will try MijnWraak's suggestion and try older drivers.




For those asking what Adaptive AA is here is a comparison, the Adaptive AA is applied to the bottom image.

I got addicted to Transparency Supersampling on the old n9600GT. Without it things like grass and trees in the distance look like cardboard cutouts.

Look, I'll stop ruining this thread with my crap. Thanks for all the help and advice. I got some more things to try and report back if I get any success.

Your powersupply has nothing today with powermanagement. I mean the powermangament savings in bios and what windows is doing and what is configured in windows. If something goes wrong, you might get weird performance.
note: 500watt powersupply is not much for your system configuration.

Its crucial to update your drivers of your chipset and check if a newer firmware for your motherboard will give fixes/improvements. If not, do not flash your motherboard, since flashing a bios is always relatively risky operation.

ps: your ima

Last edited by Bluebird B B, Mon 16 Nov 2009, 20:09.

Quote from scawen :

does not imply that we will definitely support the directories all over the place thing.

:d

Quote from JasonJ :

Actually yes, check my sig.

I appreciate your details and info. For me I don't think it's CPU limited because I get more FPS turing off AA/AF, I'll post some more comparisons a bit later when I got some more time.

The screen shots are small yes, but they are also hyperlinks. All the shots were done at 8xAA, 16xAF set by LFS. (Let Application decide set in CCC)

Thanks for the info on temps, I thought to turn on the fan to manual, but didn't want to shorten it's lifespan having it run flat out all the time. As long as 69°C is fine then no worries.

The hyprlinks link to screenshots in 150x85 pixels, that is eh small...

it going to need some serious trouble shooting, there is not a direct good explanation why you get such poor performance on your system.
Small list to try to take a look at:
- weird power-management
- overheating cpu
- firmware version motherboard
- virus/spyware
- anti-virus/anti spyware
- drivers chipset, soundcard, networkinterface
- accidentally onboard graphics card enabled("hybride mode")
- check event viewer(eventvwr) windows
- directx version
- Install vista/7 64 bits If you have a license for it

ps: My 26 inch monitor looks really small now

Last edited by Bluebird B B, Mon 16 Nov 2009, 11:09.

Quote from JasonJ :

Those shots were at 8x AA. (max in LFS) Shots were saved as low res JPGs just to upload. I was showing performance not quality. I'm not sure what it is that made you think I was using any other type of AA. I've never heard of fixed Anti-Aliasing. Or do you mean just straight 8x AA? Well I am using that anyway but the reason I was pointing out Adaptive AA is because transparencies looks pretty bad, I mean the trees and grass from a distance goes noticeably low res from a distance which looks pretty crappy. Adaptive AA fixes that ugly look.
Adaptive Anti-Aliasing - for what I can tell is used to fix the AA on transparancy textures and is known as Anti-Aliasing - Transparancy in nVidia's driver setup.

Little test with "limit fps = off"
I use fixed aa at 4x @1920x1200and do not have any of your described problems. It takes a full grid of drivers to get the fps down to 50fps(minimal value) at south city AND external view. Difference in image quality between 4x anti-aliasing and 8x is minimal. Also it looks like fps is cpu limited(eh core limited), not graphics card, because going from 0x anti-aliasing and 0x texture filtering to maximum values(8x and 16) makes no difference in fps. it did notice turning texture filtering down does have a very negative impact on image quality.

adative AA, i dont know what it does exactly, i thought it was to reduce AA in areas where it is not needed to gain performance. With a ati 4890 card i don't see any use for that in lfs. Your other point, ugly trees in the distance?? Are you using a 40 inch monitor? that is an optimization from lfs, lowering details. I did try to see ugly trees in the distance on my own system.. it looks normal to me It might be a problem you enable adative anti aliasing, but in lfs it is configured to be fixed. Try disabeling adaptive anti aliasing and for other the settings:"let application decide" in CCC.

note: your screenshots are way too small to see anything at all.
Also 67-69 celcius is normal for graphics cards You can improve this by setting a fixed fan speed. On my system 37-40% fan-speed is needed to get the temperature down by about 10 degrees. But it makes more noise so i have it set back to auto-mode.

So my opinion stays: you blame the hardware for a problem which is not hardware related Well at least not the graphics card OR the graphics card is broken, in which case you can get it back to the shop and have it repaired under warranty. However it is very unlikely a malfunctioning graphics cards gives the behavior you are describing.

Last edited by Bluebird B B, Mon 16 Nov 2009, 03:00.

Quote from Kegetys :

In XP one way to change it is from computer management, local users and groups, users and then right click on the user and go to properties. In the 'profile' tab there is a setting for home folder, which should default to empty (In which case it will use 'documents and settings', or 'users' in vista/7).

Thx, just tested it in VPC.

After changing the setting the new folder is created. None of the data was moved so I tried to move it manually which of course failed due to files being in use.

So then I booted my Win7 DVD to repair mode and used robocopy to move the files from the old user home to the new one. Then after rebooting Windows looked and behaved as if I had reinstalled the OS, with quite a few apps broken... Then I tried installing new software and guess what, Windows didn't even use the new user location I had set up but used 'Documents and Settings' instead.

So not only was the procedure complicated, it was also completely useless, and more or less messed up my (virtual) system.

Obviously I did something wrong along the way, but this little experiment has convinced me even more that something is very wrong with the Windows file location structure. I mean surely there needs to be a simple way to put the user data to a place that is not on the same drive as the OS?

Just tested on Directory Opus. It has a "Skip identical" option (skips overwrite if name, size and date are the same). Maybe that would work?

Quote from Kegetys :

Roaming is the only one in my opinion, and also the reason why I didn't include it in my list. Computers today are a whole-family thing and it is not unusual at all to have multiple users for one computer and I remember discussions on this forum as well where people would want to have different settings for different users in LFS. And while LFS is small, many other software (esp. games) for sure arent; My Dragon Age - Origins install is 15GB for example and duplicating this for all users would be a big waste, plus then also having to keep backups of all this data as well if the game would not separate the install data and user data.

True, about large programs like games, I guess. But concerning home users using multiple accounts, I think that the trend is more likely to be less people sharing computers than in the past due to ultra cheap PC and laptop prices.

Quote from Kegetys :

You backup your whole home dir (and the user registry keys) and its done. You can do it manually of course but typical use scenario would be to use a tool that does this for you (afaik. Windows 7 for example comes with some kind of transfer wizard that allows you to transfer these to a new windows installation very easily). And if all software would follow these guidelines then these tools would be simple to use and would really work - You backup the user data and everything "irreplaceable" is safe with minimal effort. Look at an LFS install for example; how could a generic backup tool know which files are install data that does not need to be backed up and which files are the user data? With the user data under the separate user home dir, you backup all that and everything is safe.

But what if I only want to backup one program, not my whole User folder? As an example Oblivion is at 'C:\Users\<user>\Documents\My Games\Oblivion' and 'C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Oblivion'.

So the backup procedure would be
-unhide folders
-set windows search to also search in hidden folders
-search the users folder for oblivion and hope nothing gets missed
-recreate the folder structures at your backup location
-copy the found folders

Hardly simple compared to just copying one folder, that you know exactly where it is, as you put it there yourself or were at least asked about it during install.

Quote from Kegetys :

You can change the user home dir to any path you want from the user profile settings any time.

Could you point me there, I couldn't find it. Would be extremely useful for Win 7 on my 4 GB SSD eee.

Anyway, thanks for the discussion, at least I now have an idea what it's all about. It does seem to me that the idea of data separation by type isn't a bad one, but is too complicated in Windows, or maybe missing tools and guidelines. Maybe each software should have a standard data manager, like it has an installer and an uninstaller, a tool that will tell you which data is where and let you move and copy it.

Last edited by J.B., Sun 15 Nov 2009, 17:56.

Looking interesting! I wonder if there will be any TV coverage? For that matter, does anyone know if Massa is doing his karting event again this year? Was quite good the last two years, definitely more fun than the silly RoC stadium events.

Quote from Kegetys :

The new, in my opinion proper, structuring is basically as follows:
- Executables and other static data in Program Files
- All user specific and "dynamic" data in user home directory*


(All this is documented by Microsoft and they do provide guidelines for using them, for example here. I think the only reason why the situation today is such a mess is that many developers simply do not follow these guidelines)

Thanks for the link. I'm still not getting it though.

Most of the listed benefits sound like they would only be useful in large corporate enviroments (roaming) and highly multi user machines with low diskspace (seperating static and dynamic data).

But even if it is a good idea to separate the location of data based on the type of data. How is the way this is done in Windows even close to being usable or practical?

You have to hunt down all the different locations that a program has installed itself to by searching in regedit and clicking through multiple hidden folders with names like 'C:\Users\<user>\AppData\LocalLow'. Hardly 'easy transfer and backup' is it?

And there isn't even a way to change the location of these special folders to another drive than the drive the OS is installed to.