ATI Silencer 1 Rev. 2

[GT2000]

I just got my Silencer rev. 2 in today, the hardest part was getting the stock ati heatsink off the gpu. Seems to be doing the trick so far, the thing that made me go do the upgrade was lock ups in HL2, didn't really seem to get them in anything else, so I'll have to burn the card in, running loops in different 3dmark apps. Currently have the 9800pro running at 9800xt speeds.

[GT2000]

Here's the back-side, showin' off some copper.. maybe ya still don't notice how big it really is...

[GT2000]

And here we have the test subject, one Built-by-ATI 9800 Pro 128mb.
(notice that dust?)

[raublekick]

my 9600 locks up for every game i've played using it :(

[GT2000]

Heatsink removed...all that holds it is two clips that need to be pinched together on the back, that was the hardest part, getting them pinched and pulling them out at the same time.
(Check out that nasty dust build up around the core.)

[GT2000]

With the new monster installed, here's the simple 2-screw bar that holds the heatsink in place.

[GT2000]

Here's how it looks sitting on the card.

[GT2000]

I had pull all my wiring out of the way before I was able to shoehorn my card with the silencer attached, barely clears that top raptor.

[GT2000]

Not sure what to tell you Raub...besides the lock ups...do you ever see any tearing or artifacts in your graphics...or do they otherwise look pretty good?

Have you tried different drivers?

Do you know what your case and cpu temps are like?
(The locking up isn't always graphics card related..)

[thecreeper]

i need a new graphics card so bad. new sound card would help too. maybe a bigger hard drive.

and a new motherboard for that matter.

god, my computer is such a grandma right now.

[GT2000]

I must say, I love the way my computer runs right now, it's been a bitch the last couple of days, but I think I just need another defrag, some apps have been hanging for a minute or two, and firefox has been locking up while downloading 1-2 gig files with it. But it eats most anything I throw at it.

You could pretty much take $500-600 and have yourself a nice system Zach. I don't know what your price range is like, or when you'll be looking intoi it, but look at the Nvidia 6600GTs...I've seen them for around $160-180, and they handle their own pretty well.

Also, I wouldn't worry so much about a sound card, I still run the onboard sound of my Shuttle An05r, I took the Santa Cruz out of my system, I just see no difference between the two when hooked up to my 600W surround. And storage is cheap...and ram as at it's lowest in years, with DDR3 out, DDR2 is even dropping. You can find single 1 gig sticks of PC2700-3200 for $100 or less.

[raublekick]

Not sure what to tell you Raub...besides the lock ups...do you ever see any tearing or artifacts in your graphics...or do they otherwise look pretty good?

Have you tried different drivers?

Do you know what your case and cpu temps are like?
(The locking up isn't always graphics card related..)

No tearing or artifacts whatsoever. It always looks super nice. My case and CPU temps are MUCH lower than my old computer.

The games I've tried are: Morrowind, KOTOR, and Doom 3. Each have slightly different problems, but similar enough. Morrowind ran pretty much fine on my old Athlon 1.6GHz (256DDR, GeForce2 64MB) other than crashing to the desktop which is a problem with the game, but it locks up a lot on my P4 2.8GHz (756DDR, Radeon9600 256MB). KOTOR locks up to the point where I have to hard reset and it eventually led to the corruption of my saved data. Doom 3 has various problems, locking up included. Because Morrowind runs worse on a system with specs twice as good and loads cooler, I suspect it is the videocard.

What other ATI drivers are available? I tried the KX Audio drivers for my Audigy 2, but they didn't work as well as the Creative drivers so I'm kinda weray about using third party drivers.

[GT2000]

Weary about using 3rd party drivers...I understand that, but, give the omega ati drivers a shot..here's a link, make sure you uninstall the old ones first...I'll link you to a program for that as well. If you still have the problem, the omega drivers include an overclocking feature, which you may want to actually try underclocking your card some on both the gpu and the mem.

Omega drivers
http://www.omegadrivers.net/ati/win2k_xp.php

Driver Cleaner
http://www.drivercleaner.net/

Give that a whir, if still nothing...and you still have that old geforce handy, pop that in and see what happens.

[raublekick]

Ohyeah I remember reading about those. Right now I have 0 games installed with no intentions (or time) to install and play any. But next time I do I'll give them a shot.

How important is it to use DriverCleaner? It's such a long process, I don't know if I buy into it too much.

[GT2000]

Heh..you'll more than likely be ok, but there's always that small percent chance that an old file could conflict with a newer one. But...it only took me about 5 minutes to do when I did it, run it, reboot into safe mode...forget what you do there, only takes a minute, then reboot while not connected to the net still, and then install new drivers.

[thecreeper]

the chance of me getting any money to upgrade my computer is slim. my hopes is that a delivery truck of computer parts overturns and i can steal everything i need.

i'm just more annoyed at this computer than anything. the CD burner has been dying, the fan sounds like its rattling but i can't get it to stop, it still has that problem i got years ago that makes it take 5 minutes to start windows, and it's been really slow loading certain programs because my hard drive is out of space.

but for some reason it can run Doom3 and everything before it. though i don't think i am even gonna try HL2. As long as this bitch makes it through college, I'll be happy.

[raublekick]

well, since i don't have any TVs right now and Eposode III got me in the Star Wars mood again, I decided I need to play some KOTOR. I haven't tried it with my new XP install or the latest ATI drivers, but I think I'm gonna try the Omega drivers first. I was actually thinking it could have been my hard drive that was messing up games, because I had a 12GB C: Windows parition and the rest of the drive was a D: partition that I installed all programs to and saved everything on. Maybe the games just didn't like the partition? Now it's just a big ass C: partition. Who knows what the actual culprit was/is? If these Omega drivers work with no problems then I really don't care!

[raublekick]

eep... i can't even play the game now >:O

[GT2000]

Can't play?

[raublekick]

I installed the game after installing the Omega drivers. First time I configured it a little, went through the character setup, and started the game. It was going fine until it puts you into control. At this point the graphics got a little glitchy and it got hung up. This happened a few more times and I was able to close through Task Manager. Eventually it just locked my computer up completely. Then it started locking up when loading after character creation. I realized this was because I set the brightness up higher, and when it was loading it changed the gamma and locked. So I reset it to default and got back to where I was before.