Chaos

awesome fricking episode. i had to se the robot chicken version after i saw it though seeing they mentioned it at the end of family guy. if you havent already seen it, check out the full episode here: http://www.adultswim.com/shows/robotchicke...ivcp/index.html

nice rig man, looks really smooth. im gonna be building a new one here in a few weeks. going with a 2.80 GHz AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 dual core CPU, XFX MB-N590ASH9, SATA DVD burner, 500 GB SATA hard drive, OCZ 2 GB SLI edition dual channel 800 MHz ram, 680-watt Apevia Iceberg power supply, and of course, dual XFX GeForce 8600 GT XXX Edition video cards. the way i figure, this computer should be able to run anything i throw at it at full resolution. i'll do a 3dmark score on it once i get it built to see if its better than yours

from what i've heard, water cooled systems run colder than fan systems, but they also lose performance. im not a water guy myself. i'd rather have good old fans anyday

well, its sorta hard to explain. it took me a while to figure it out the first time but after that its like riding a bike. theres about 4 main files on GTA. the most important of which is the GTA3.img which is in the "models" folder of your GTASA directory (you can open that file with this tool here thats really the only thing you'd HAVE to edit, the rest is just optional. so you download a car from anywhere that gives out mods for GTA. my fav car designer is JVT from www.jvtdesign.net. once you download a car, it should come with 2 files and a readme. the files will be a .dff and a .txd these are the files you would replace in the GTA3.img. so say its named "elegant.dff" and "elegant.txd" that would mean that it would replace the car "Elegant" in the game. so you'd find the 2 "elegant" files in the img by doing a F2 (which brings up a search box) and typing just "elegant" that would find the .dff file i believe. right click on it and rename it to "elegant.dff.old" and then hit F3 (which finds the next word) and it should find the elegant.txd. do the same rename thing for that file too. then go to Commands > Add and choose the 2 files that you want to add, in this case the elegant files. when they're added to the img, go to Commands > Rebuild Archive. when thats done, your car is added and you can close that IMG Tool. now if you want the rest of the stuff for the car (custom handling, rims, colors, etc) theres 3 other files you have to edit. everything else is in your "data" folder in your GTASA directory. the 3 files you want to open are "carcols.dat" "vehicles.ide" (this is different for any game other than GTASA, vice city for example you'd have to open "default.ide" instead) and finally open up "handling.cfg" if windows doesnt know what to do with these files, open them with notepad. now's the part where you gotta look through that readme file. there should be 3 lines in there, one is for carcols, one is handling, and one is vehicles. its really easy to figure out which is which. handling would have the name of the car and then a bunch of numbers after it. like "Elegant 1203.368.5686.796.98.7987.0..7" or something of that nature. vehicles would have a number, followed by the name of the car, followed by the name of the car again (with big spaces in between) and the carcols would just be the name of the car, with a few sets of numbers after it separated by comma's. in the case that theres also a line for "carmods.dat", i wouldnt suggest adding that. its made so you can customize it at transfender, but i've never been able to get the cars to load if i add anything to carmods.dat so i would just skip it. if all went well, you should be able to load up san andreas with your new car

yea ive been doing this stuff since i got vice city for the computer back in 03. although i dont use a mod installer, i do it all manually. that way i know exactly how its gona turn out, and i can put my own colors in instead of what the designer of the cars want. and my own rims on the cars too

well another thing i could ask you is, are you running a x86 version of windows or a x64? cuz if you're running a 64-bit processor in a 32-bit windows, its not gonna run at even half of its capability. if you are running 32-bit, i'd suggest trying an upgrade to a 64-bit version and i bet your computer will run almost twice as fast without the need for anymore overclocking

what is this thread about

hmm... maybe my setup is different than yours then. in my case, if i go ANYTHING over 200 MHz on my ram, it wont start, so im maxed out on overclocking because of that, thats weird that it would let you go all the way up to 235 MHz and not freeze up. and also weird that the ram is SLOWER when your overclocked. if you got a camera or something, maybe take a picture of your bios screen for me on what settings you're changing.

thats that nice 244T isnt it 1920 x 1200 resolution? thats the monitor i've been looking at (too bad its nearly $700) too bad i cant find any monitors that run at the full 2560 x 1600 resolution of my video cards i have to congratulate you on that monitor though, cant wait til i can get my hands on one! P.S. could you maybe compare it to something for me so i can get the gist of how big it actually is? thanks bro

yea but your memory and FSB is at 201 MHz now... weird... well as far as i can see, thats what your problem is. your ram is most likely standard PC3200 DDR-400 ram, which tops out at 200 MHz which means you're topped out on what your ram can handle, which explains why it locks up. if you want to overclock more, i dont think you'll be able to with that motherboard, so you'd have to grab a new motherboard that supports DDR2 and grab some new ram too so you can go faster.

oh and could you post a screenshot of your SPD page of CPU-Z too? a screenshot for every slot of ram please

yea thats most likely your problem right there. my CPU-Z says im running my ram at 200 MHz, and my FSB is rated at 400... so if i got faster ram, i could overclock a bit more, but yours... yours says you're running at 240 bus speed, and can go up to 960... with only 174 memory clock. something seems weird there. what brand of motherboard do you have? i'll look up exactly what you'd need to do to get the most out of your timings.

http://www.cd-eject-tool.com/downloads/cd-eject-tool-2.9.exe try installing that, and the next time it locks up on you, go into your taskbar trash for your drive, right click > preferences > click on your drives tab up top > and see if the "lock the drive's door" box is checked. if it is, just uncheck it and eject.

theres your problem right there. get some better cooling man! i overclocked my old Barton AMD from 1.3 to 2.0 GHz and im still running at a smooth 33C anything over about 55C sets off an "alarm" (we'll just call it that cuz thats what it pretty much is) on the motherboard telling the computer to shut down immediately. now i've never had to mess with voltage settings to overclock, only memory timings. im betting i could get my CPU up to 2.5 GHz if i had some faster ram (im still running some old DDR 333 MHz crap) but im guessing thats your problem. depending on how fast your ram is limits how much you can overclock, that and how hot your CPU is getting

sometimes the computer "locks" cd drives so that you cant eject it. does this happen only when theres a cd in the drive? or even when there isnt?

a new router/faster router wont really do anything. the speed of the router (in your case 54 MBps) refers to how fast your router can transfer speeds on your internal network. so in other words, you can transfar things from computer-to-computer wirelessly in your house (your lan) at 54 MBps. to give you a idea of how fast that is, USB 2.0 is 480 MBps. what i have found to make your internet "seem" faster without actually BEING faster is, if you own a linksys router, if you install a firmware called DD-WRT. you can boost the wireless signal and you can mess around with alot of settings. you can turn a $40 router into one that performs like a $200 router. your webpages will open alot faster with the speedbooster setting enabled (and you dont even have to own a linksys router that has speedbooster) and also if you use firefox and enable network pipelining, webpages will load 2-3 times faster. although nothing will affect your download speeds at all (except for getting a new internet plan of course) you will notice a serious difference in the amount of time it takes for webpages to load. hope this helped you out Slinky and i hope that XP Game Edition is working for you

i got this baby once. it pissed me off so much. if you have system restore on, i suggest restoring your computer to an earlier time. it wont delete anything from your computer, but it will get rid of the virus (like i said, i had the same one before) thats the easiest way to do it. hope that helps

ah yea... i hate UPS's. all they ever do is beep and the batteries die so fast. all you need is a surge protector. i'd suggest just grabbing a cheat power strip/surge protector combo for like $10 and use that instead of the UPS. it will probably solve all of your problems and you wont get annoyed by beeping

you sure its not just the default power settings on the operating system? most of the time windows ships with power saving settings enabled. if you leave the computer dormant for too long it will sometimes turn off the monitor or go into sleep mode or hibernation mode. do you have Windows XP, Vista?

well i found a torrent for it: http://thepiratebay.org/tor/3700098/Windows_Gamer_Edition (sorry for those of you who downloaded yesterdays links, the file i uploaded didnt work) if you guys dont know how to download a torrent, send me a pm or if the mods dont want me to post links to stuff like that here, feel free to delete the link

well, i would say just cut the wires for the fan and wire them directly to the switch. im pretty sure that the yellow cable on the fan is for data purposes only (so that your PC, fan controller etc. can read how fast the fan is spinning) so all you need is the black and red to make it spin. i say test it out and let me know the results

yea really, i'd say thats your best bet. i actually triple boot 3 different operating systems on my PC, XP Black edition, Game Edition and Vista. i see it as "i know vista sucks for gaming... so whats the point of wasting 3 more GB of space on a HD to install a game that already runs PERFECTLY on Game Edition?" and really, if you like Vista that bad, just use XP for games (as it works perfectly no matter what game you're playing) and Vista for everything else

yea sorry i didnt give the link, a few people actually aked me for it, but it seems that the entire Game Edition project was halted for good... so i cant give you a link right this second, but luckily i still have my Game Edition disc (and its only like 500 MB so it fits on a regular CD-R) so i can just upload that permanently to megaupload. the only problem is, i dont have the account info for megaupload, otherwise i could get to uploading right now and it MIGHT be done by tomorrow.

if i were you, i'd just stop trying. BF2 has compatibility issues with Vista ATM. if you REALLY want to play it that bad, i say try a dual-boot of Vista and XP. Xp for games, Vista for the rest. i dont know if i'd get flagged by the mods here, but i could give you a link to a real nice "XP Game Edition" i got. it runs less than half the resources of normal XP (so it boosts the hell out of speed in games) and it never has to be registered with MS. it works wonders, lemme know if you're interested.

thats actually a hell of a good video card. (for a laptop of course) i wouldnt even bother spending the money on a new one. most laptop video is onboard and shared memory, so it eats up your ram while playing games and such. tbh, ive never had to install a video card in a laptop before so i wouldnt know how, but like i said, i'd just leave it like it is. 256 MB aint bad and im sure laptop video cards arent cheap (especially if you want one in the 512 MB range) If you find one cheap enough that you're willing to get and REALLY want to install it, im sure you can find a maintenance guide for your laptop on the manufacturers website.