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MrHoatzin

My graphics card has kicked the proverbial

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I built this PC when I went to college. When I graduated and enjobbed myself I got the best graphic card I could get for the by-then-already-way-obsolete AGP8 port and maxed out the ram so that I could play Bioshock. So that worked for a while.

By recently, Minecraft what chuggy and I had to lower the fidelity of TellTale games.

I played some free Back to the Future ep1 last night and it would crash to desktop when I turned on fancier shadows.

Today the computer gives me the blue screen of graphics card infinite loop detected—so the card is borked or the drivers are...

:tdown::hah::frusty::(:bomb: :\ :cens0r:

So, is there anything I can do to make sure the card is not fibbing? I already tried blowing the dust out of the machine, there was a cubic meter of dust in that thing. That didn't help. How does one force XP to go into safe mode? I seem to have forgotten how to use PCs.

I have an old Radeon 9600 Pro in a box somewhere, I guess I could turn this dude into a tv box or something and retire that Ubuntu-running Thinkpad t30 abomination that's been begging me to kill it for years now. Hmm.

I don't feel like buying another PC. I am looking at iMacs and I am currently freaked out by the sticker... Also, having not purchased a computer in forever, I have no idea what to go for. I've been thinking this. I am not sure what the difference between processors is as far as gaming is concerned. Also, how decent is the graphics card that iMacs come with? I use one at work every day, but I have not tried playing games on it. Are Mac Minis any good for gaming?

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Don't get an iMac until they upgrade to sandybridge, which is rumoured to be in a month or so. The current GPU is pretty decent, but nothing special, it may be improved with the upcoming refresh.

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Hmmm....

The processors include a "service" called Intel Insider, which the company claims is "an extra layer of content protection",[18] and despite claims, is a form of Digital rights management (a technology that inhibits uses of digital content not desired or intended by the content provider).

In addition, Sandy Bridge processors have security features that include the ability to remotely disable a PC or erase information from hard drives. This can be useful in the case of a lost or stolen PC. The commands can be received through 3G signals, ethernet, or internet connections. AES encryption acceleration will be available, which can be useful for video conferencing and VoIP applications.[19]

What is this shit? I can't imagine any of this will actually affect me, but it is fucked up and uncool.

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Well, if they do refresh the line, you can probably get a refurb old model for cheaper.

Refurb Macs are generally cool - my last MacBook was a refurb, and when it died last year it was entirely my fault.

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Portal 2 apparently says the minimum gfx card is a Nvidia 8500 or something - a mac mini that I sold to a friend has a Nvidia 9600 in it.

So it might just about run Portal 2, but will be minimum settings.

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Mm, the minis aren't set up to be AWESOME POWERFUL MACHINES, they're more set up to be affordable.

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Mm, the minis aren't set up to be AWESOME POWERFUL MACHINES, they're more set up to be "affordable".

Fixed.

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Well, if they do refresh the line, you can probably get a refurb old model for cheaper.

Refurb Macs are generally cool - my last MacBook was a refurb, and when it died last year it was entirely my fault.

I kindof want it to last more than two years... and I don't want to think about computers for a long time, frankly...

Pull up a chair, lemme tell you a tale full of sound and fury and whatchamacallits and the like. See, currently in the house, in addition to the XP-running 8-year-old Pentium IV (which is now rebooting with the old Radeon9600Pro and looking forward to being demoted to TV box), I have a Thinkpad T30 which was the height of fashion back when IBM made computers.

A few years ago, when formatting it to clean out years of grime that has accumulated in it, I unwittingly wiped out the partition that contained the customized Windows that that thing requires installed upon it to function. Lenovo wanted me to call them in Hong Kong and order a new copy of the OS over the phone. This I deemed to be too much bother, so I installed Ubuntu on it. It took me two weeks to get it to output to a TV and calibrate correctly the saturation output to the secondary video. But then it worked! It had only USB 1 so copying stuff to it has been a chore, but whatever. When Jaundiced Jack-a-doodle was released, some sort of kernel firmware change caused my wifi card to become incompatible with Linux. I spent another week or two dicking with rolling back the particular bit of firmware and recompiling Ubuntu, only to have Firefox refuse to initiate due to a resonance cascade on the dependancy front. So I rolled back all the changes I had made and I haven't connected to the internet with that thing in over a year.

The third computer, the best thing that I have in the house, is PowerPC G5 Mac Pro that I bought from the company for $200 when we upgraded to Intel because Mrs. Kingzjester (Queenzjester?) wanted something that can run Final Cut. It is running Vanilla Leopard, two version old Adobe creative suite, two versions old Final Cut and, now two weeks ago, I downloaded Firefox 4 only for it to tell me it cannot be installed on this machine.

So fuck all that shit. Except for that PC, all these were bought used. I am boldly breaking new ground and buying new. At the current rate of hardware obsolescence, maybe it will last me ten years.

Unless, of course, Apple decides that it will no longer support computers that don't have iPanopticon For-Your-Protection Anti-Terrorism hardware-based-iOS architecture (preferences give you two options tops for each program, all file management happens through iTunes, Terminal access doesn't exist, you have to have a special $25000 dongle to compile programs, using the dongle breaks the warranty; bundles together with the SuperMagiCaliFornicationistic Mac Keyboard that has only 12 keys and a mouse that is brilliantly designed to have only half a button and to not really work, even after you spend six months getting used to its new paradigm).

Edited by Kingzjester
Upon reflection, SuperMagicalCaliFornicationistic was redundant

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Just buy an i7 MBP then, I guess. Or a 12 core Mac Pro. Depends how much moolah you've got lying around.

A refurbed 2010 MBP will do you if you're more constricted. I've got a 13" dual core 2010 MBP and it plays SC and should easily play portal, although not Crysis 2. I've given up on PCs, largely.

I've been totally impressed with the stability and speed of running OSX - Fusion (for W7 sec test VMs is so stable, really really impressed). If you really want to run games, you can bootcamp the MBP and it will steamroller fairly new games (although Shogun 2 on full will make it struggle I guess).

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I had a doozy of an infinite loop problem with my Radeon a while back when I installed new drivers to play Magicka. After a bunch of bullshit I finally just reinstalled the old drivers and everything was A-OK again. That might not work for you if your card is well and truly borked, but I'm just saying -it might actually be a driver problem.

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The screen starts out garbled during boot, so I don't think it is a driver issue.

Scrobbs, I don't think I can justify a Mac Pro, and as I am likely going to be getting a crisp new Mac Book Pro from work, I don't really need a lappytop. Jesus, those acronyms are dense. Lemme read more carefully here... "W7 sec test VMs", that'll be Windows 7 something test virtual machines? What does "sec test VMs" mean?

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I can't seem to uninstall Far Cry 2 because whenever I go to delete local content in Steam, it starts the game on me, and I can't see shit because the graphics card is way antiquated—but because it has been set up for the old card it doesn't put up a fight. I can hear that lovely diegetic menu flapping in the savannah ambiance and the billowing Civ-esque intro music, I can click around and turn pages, but I see nothing.

UPDATE: Huh, scratch that, Steam now says the game is no longer installed, so I did something.

Edited by Kingzjester

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That sounds like you've done something bizarre to it on top of the card ish. Have you considered reformatting to start with a clean slate or using a bootable Linux distro, to make sure?

(Also, the death of my MacBook last year was because I shorted out the logic board by plugging something stupid into the USB port, and it was completely my own fault and not the fault of the Mac. The only reason I didn't get it fixed and continue with it was because I needed a laptop for work in 2 days, and a new logic board would have taken a week or 2 to get installed at my local Mac Repair Cubbyhole.)

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Only thing that I did was get the Back to the Future game which installed some sort of directx update and then crashed to desktop a couple of times upon loading a new area with shadows set to high quality. I restarted at least twice yesterday between updating directx and it crapping out and it booted just fine.

This was a documented game bug, btw.

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Scrobbs, I don't think I can justify a Mac Pro, and as I am likely going to be getting a crisp new Mac Book Pro from work, I don't really need a lappytop. Jesus, those acronyms are dense. Lemme read more carefully here... "W7 sec test VMs", that'll be Windows 7 something test virtual machines? What does "sec test VMs" mean?

Sorry - Windows 7 Security Testing Virtual Machines. 'Tis what I do, and unfortunately most of the security tools don't work under OSX, so I have VMs set up to do said testing...under which Fusion has displayed impressive stability.

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I honestly think that if gaming is at the top of your list, you really shouldn't be considering Macs. That's not to say they're bad or anything (in fact, their screens are so nice that I'd love to have one myself), just clearly not meant for that purpose.

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Of course gaming is not the priority. I prefer the OS in general. If I can get games to run on it if I want them to, I don't have to pro/con the decision. I could just get a console if I merely wanted to play games.

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Of course gaming is not the priority. I prefer the OS in general. If I can get games to run on it if I want them to, I don't have to pro/con the decision. I could just get a console if I merely wanted to play games.

Fair enough, just thought it should be said either way.

I managed to dig up some benchmarks on the latest rev of iMac hardware with that GPU. Overall, seems to be pretty competent with contemporary games, though all signs point to it not really being future proofed i.e. you're buying old hardware. If you don't mind cranking more recent games down to fairly low detail levels/resolutions, it should be fine.

http://mattgadient.com/2010/08/01/imac-21-5-i3-3-2ghz-with-the-radeon-5670-mid-2010-in-gaming/

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No, you'd probably end up booting to Windows to do most of your gaming.

Unless you're planning to be a Graphic Design Hipster at home as well as at work?

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No, you'd probably end up booting to Windows to do most of your gaming.

Unless you're planning to be a Graphic Design Hipster at home as well as at work?

This is also true. Though I guess if you still have the system disk for your old computer's version of Windows, you can just use that for the Bootcamp install.

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I don't know if I can use my old XP on a completely different machine... All the hardware tweakery through the years has expired my allocated number of installs. My mother works at a university and my sister is still enrolled at one, so I can probably get them to grab me a copy of Win 7 for a pittance.

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... on that note, what is the preferred flavor of Win7? I don't care about backwards compatibility of the accounting software I bought in 1998, but I don't want to accidentally buy Granny's AOL Machine™ edition, as I suspect all versions may be labeled with equally connotation-free, unenlightening corporate superlatives.

Sorry I'm spamming my own thread. Kingz doesn't get it, when will Kingz get it, etc.

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What is this shit? I can't imagine any of this will actually affect me, but it is fucked up and uncool.

I'm still waiting for answer from Patters... I'd like to know.

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