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Need Advice to Replace GeForce 7950GTOC With a DirectX11 Nvidia Card



 
 
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  #11  
Old January 9th 13, 08:10 AM posted to alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia
Paul
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Posts: 13,364
Default Need Advice to Replace GeForce 7950GTOC With a DirectX11 NvidiaCard

Ant wrote:
On 1/8/2013 2:03 PM PT, Paul typed:

The fan revving on the 7950 is normal. It's designed to run at
a high fan setting, until the driver loads. Then the fan is turned
down by the driver. There's only one problem with that - if you
happen to boot Linux while using the 7950 (like a LiveCD), the fan
could well stay at the top setting for the entire section. The
driver code might be in the NVidia-produced driver, but
not in the default Linux driver.


Yeah, I saw this behavior too with my old GeForce 8800 GT video card and
the closed NVIDIA binary drivers in Debian. I used to exit X to idle
console mode, but that made my video card fan spin loud and fast.


I hated that behavior enough, I control the video card fan
separately. The setting the driver uses, is now irrelevant.
The fan runs off a separate power path. I adjusted the fan
voltage, so I get the same fan speed as before (when the
driver was under control). It means I have the nuisance of a
few extra wires, right next to my video card.


Is it difficult/hard to do?


I needed some connector pins, connector shells, wires, and
some 1N4000 series diodes.

I made a Y cable for the fan, because my motherboard didn't
have enough fan headers. The Y cable, allows one fork of the
Y to run a regular fan, the other fork runs the video card fan.
My local electronics store has male and female fan cable connectors
I can use.

The video card has a 12V fan on it. On some older fans years
ago, I think they've also used 5V on occasion. So you have to be
careful with what kind of fan it is.

The diodes drop some voltage. I suppose I could use resistors,
or I could even use an LM317 variable voltage regulator, and do a
nice job. Diodes are just a tradition in my ghetto PC projects :-)
The diode drops 0.7V. Putting 7 of them in series
gives a drop of 4.9V. 12 - 4.9V gives about 7 volts for the fan.

If the fan speed isn't fast enough, you take one of the diodes
out of the chain. The diodes dissipate a small enough amount of
power, they don't need special effort at cooling them. If you
do this with a monster 1 ampere fan, then expect smoke :-)
No matter what you use, you always check the power dissipated
doesn't overheat something (volts times current).

+12 ---diode--diode--diode--diode--diode--diode--fan---+
|
GND ---------------------------------------------------+

That's the basic idea.

If you look hard enough, you might be able to find a pre-built
commercial solution. For example, some small company in Germany
was building fan controllers years ago, and that thing may have had
three pin fan headers on it. Then, you could run the video card
fan over to a thing like that, and adjust for the speed you want.

I do things like this, mainly because I can... rather than because
I should. I was just so annoyed about the 100% fan speed, and
just thinking about being treated like that by NVidia, I had to
do something about it. The thing is, if NVidia put their minds to
it, they could have completely automated the cooling function
in hardware. There was no excuse for a 1950's style "wait for
the driver to figure it out" type solution. I know that using
software to fill in "hardware gaps" is popular in some circles,
but eventually it gets a bit old.

Paul
  #12  
Old January 9th 13, 08:16 AM posted to alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia
Paul
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Posts: 13,364
Default Need Advice to Replace GeForce 7950GTOC With a DirectX11 NvidiaCard

Paul wrote:
Ant wrote:



Is it difficult/hard to do?



Some how my diagram lost its +12V feed :-)
We'll see if this works any better. Here, I removed
a diode to give a little more voltage to the fan.

+12V ---diode--diode--diode--diode--diode--diode--fan---+
|
GND ----------------------------------------------------+

Paul
  #13  
Old January 9th 13, 11:38 AM posted to alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia
Damaeus[_3_]
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Posts: 79
Default Need Advice to Replace GeForce 7950GTOC With a DirectX11 Nvidia Card

In news:alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia, Paul
posted on Tue, 01 Jan 2013 15:08:48 -0500 the following:

As for mid-range video cards, I always feel regrets later, when
I look at the my bone-yard of slow and lonely video cards. For example,
I have a bushel of FX5200s, and no more driver support :-)

The main benefit you're likely to get from the new video card,
is "buzz word compliance". Any new tech that games might use,
your new card will have it. Whereas the 7950 will likely run all
your old DirectX 9 games, you can look forward to running demos
for the newer stuff, to see what all the excitement is about.
And if some program needs GPGPU acceleration, you'll have a
chance of trying that out as well.


Oh god. Well, I've tested the GeForce GTX 650 on a couple of browser
games to compare it to the 7950 GT. This GTX 650 thing is HORRIBLE! I
was able to use the 7950 GT for a little bit on CoasterVille before my PC
rebooted itself and the animations were so smooth and I was so delighted.
This 650 makes the game play more like my roommate's dual-core 2 GHz
processor, though it's not quite that bad, and I have a six-core 3.5 GHz
processor. Mine looks like about 25 frames per second. His looks more
like 10 frames per second, at best. My 7950 GT looked like 60 frames per
second. I'm so disappointed. At this point, the only thing that makes
THIS card better than my old one is the fact that my PC hasn't rebooted
with it in there. ::: ( I added this parenthetical to a saved draft I
was composing earlier: ... My PC rebooted itself again after behaving for
about 3.5 hours. The rest of this was written yesterday afternoon as the
above portion was.)

I'm just utterly disgusted. I thought I was looking at the most important
comparisons when checking the GPU Review website, not that it mattered. I
only had so much money to spend and I couldn't afford a higher-priced
card. But remember, studies say having more money won't make you any
happier. Yeah, right!

I hope you have fixed-width:

7950 GT GTX 650
..===============================================| ====================.
| GPU: | G71 | GK107 |
| Release Date: | 2006-09-06 | 2012-09-13 |
| Interface: | PCI-E x16 | PCI-E 3.0 x16 |
| Core Clock: | 550 MHz | 1058 MHz |
| Shader Clock: | --- | 1058 MHz |
| Memory Clock: | 700 MHz (1400 DDR) | 2500 MHz (5000 DDR)|
| RAMDACs (MHz) | 400 | |
| CUDA Cores | | 384 |
| Memory Bandwidth: | 44.8 GB/sec | 80 GB/sec |
| Standard Memory | 512 MB DDR3 | 1024 MB GDDR5 |
| Shader Operations: | 13200 MOperations/sec | --- |
| Pixel Fill Rate: | 8800 MPixels/sec | 16928 MPixels/sec |
| Texture Fill Rate: | 13200 MTexels/sec | 33856 MTexels/sec |
| Vertex Operations: | 1100 MVertices/sec | --- |
| FLOPS | --- | 812.544 GFLOPS |
| Px. per clock (peak) | 24 | |
| Memory Bus | 256-bit | 128-bit |
|--------------------------------------------------------------------|
| Passmark G3D Mark | 287 | 1822 |
'================================================= ===================`


It LOOKS like the GTX 650 is better if the texture fill rate, pixel fill
rate memory bandwidth and all that jazz is supposed to be important. I
don't see why the GTX 650 can have higher specifications in those areas,
and yet perform at such a dramatically inferior level. I had more
comparisons in the chart, but since I already know I don't want to keep
this GTX 650, I didn't bother adding more.

In actual use, it most definitely is NOT better than the 7950 GT, at least
in the few games I was trying out as a test. Granted, they aren't
full-fledged stand-alone games. The two I tested as best I could were
CoasterVille and FarmVille 2, which might be "meh" games to serious
gamers, but since I don't have any rockin' heavy games to play right now,
I get my entertainment with games I can play for free. With the GTX 650,
animations in CoasterVille were choppy, almost as bad as my friend's PC,
which has an Intel dual-core 2.21 GHz processor and an Intel G33/G31
Express integrated graphics chip. That's pretty embarrasing for the GTX
650, but I never tested it on a real game. I took it out of my system
because the 7950 GT plays the game with far more fluidity. Farmville 2
was even on the verge of being unplayable. It certainly wasn't enjoyable.
I'm hoping I can get a refund on it, or even a store credit at Newegg.com
so I can put that credit toward a better video card in the
future...preferably an Nvidia card that supports DirectX 11.1 so I can get
the full benefit of it in Windows 8.

One thing that does have me baffled, though, is why Farmville 2 isn't
showing up with all the "pretties" it had in my old Fatal1ty setup. All
my hardware (except the hard drive and case) are newer and better than my
old stuff, and I'm using the same video card. Yet I can't zoom out as far
in FarmVille 2, the full-screen button is gone, plus there are several
animations missing, as well as game elements like the tall, animated grass
in areas I haven't expanded my farm to yet. I'm using the same driver I
was using before, too; I've got the latest version of the Flash player;
and I've disabled Pepperflash in Chrome, which is the browser I was using
before. I don't have all the Windows updates yet, but I don't think I had
these updates before, either, because I had them disabled for so long. I
later downloaded them all when I started having problems on the Fatal1ty.
Can you think of anything I might be missing that would make Farmville
look like a game designed on the cheap?

Anyway, I've changed my setup again. I put the 7950 GT back in, and I'm
not powering the PC using my battery backup anymore. It's actually a
couple of years beyond its three years of service, but it was behaving and
it still gave me 20-25 minutes of uptime during power outages. But
someone suggested it might be going bad and he suggested trying it plugged
into the wall instead. I just stuck it in a surge protector. So far,
I've had no issues...but then I said that before about the GTX 650 until I
had another reboot. Yet before, with the 7950 GT and automatic
configuration of memory speed, timing, etc..., this thing would not even
last for 10-15 seconds past exiting the BIOS before it was rebooting. It
did better if I raised the memory speed to 2133 MHz, and changed the
timing and voltage to match, but I still eventually had a reboot.

While I hate running without a battery since I feel vulnerable to spikes
and outages (I feel like a UPS is more protective than a regular old surge
protector), at least I might be able to stay up and running until I can
get a new UPS.

Damaeus
  #14  
Old January 9th 13, 06:03 PM posted to alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia
Paul
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Posts: 13,364
Default Need Advice to Replace GeForce 7950GTOC With a DirectX11 NvidiaCard

Damaeus wrote:


Anyway, I've changed my setup again. I put the 7950 GT back in, and I'm
not powering the PC using my battery backup anymore.


Are you uninstalling and reinstalling the driver when changing cards ?

Steps I'd do if changing cards.

1) 7950 in place.
Go to Add/Remove.
Remove driver.
Shutdown.
2) Change cards.
Install the 650.
3) Start system.
System comes up in 800x600 and 16 colors.
Install a recent NVidia driver which supports 650.
Test.

And vice-versa when going back to the 7950. Give the
driver the chance to optimize settings for the newly
installed card.

HTH,
Paul
  #15  
Old January 9th 13, 07:51 PM posted to alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia
Paul
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Posts: 13,364
Default Need Advice to Replace GeForce 7950GTOC With a DirectX11 NvidiaCard

Damaeus wrote:

The two I tested as best I could were
CoasterVille and FarmVille 2


The problem with the games, is how they're implemented.

http://support.zynga.com/article/coa...rements1-en_US

"Browser Version

Flash Version
Adobe Flash Player v.10.2 and up --- hardware accelerated version ?
--- hardware acceleration enabled ?
(Maybe accel is only for video)

Java Version
JAVA SE 6 and up
"

So it's a Java and Flash game, rather than DirectX.

It might be using 2D operations on the card, like BITBLT.
And I don't really know if either Java or Flash, have
assist from hardware or not.

It probably has some dependency on processor.

"AMD FX-6300 Vishera 3.5 GHz (AM3+)"

versus the old system

"Abit Fatal1ty AN9 32x
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4200+"
Probably 2.2GHz, 2 x 512KB L2 Cache

Chances are, your new setup for whatever reason, is
rendering everything via CPU. And the GPU is being
used as a dumb frame buffer. Otherwise, your new
hardware should have had some advantages.

They'd probably list all their cards, if they
thought about it. There do seem to be differences,
when for example, a card doesn't work properly with
Flash. They're not all created as equal as this page
would suggest.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/gpus_su...dobeflash.html

*******

If you want to benchmark, there's the 3DMark series.
This would be testing a really old version of Direct3D,
but I like it because it's a relatively small download.
(I have one other demo that is only 4MB, but it kinda
sucks as a test. Not enough graphics load.)

http://www.majorgeeks.com/3Dmark_d99.html

You should be able to do better than the following,
with either of your cards (44089 3DMark2001). Just click
the Benchmark button and let it run. I get in the low
200's of FPS for the Nature scene for example. The FPS
varies during the scene, from around 200, to a spike of
around 400. But the low end of 200's covers it.

http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/3...mark2001se.gif

Also, when the MerryGoRound scene appears, I get a
bit of "coil noise" coming from either my video card
or the motherboard :-) Just for that sense of realism.
I guess.

Paul
  #16  
Old January 10th 13, 01:02 AM posted to alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia
Damaeus[_3_]
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Posts: 79
Default Need Advice to Replace GeForce 7950GTOC With a DirectX11 Nvidia Card

In news:alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia, Paul
posted on Wed, 09 Jan 2013 12:03:50 -0500 the following:

Steps I'd do if changing cards.

1) 7950 in place.
Go to Add/Remove.
Remove driver.
Shutdown.
2) Change cards.
Install the 650.
3) Start system.
System comes up in 800x600 and 16 colors.
Install a recent NVidia driver which supports 650.
Test.

And vice-versa when going back to the 7950. Give the
driver the chance to optimize settings for the newly
installed card.


Yes, I did install different drivers. In fact, I had to download a
different driver for each card. The driver I downloaded for the 650 would
not recognize the 7950 GTOC. Are you saying that the 650 SHOULD be better
than the 7950 GTOC? I know we've talked about this before, but if the 650
should be better in general, I might keep it. I'll see if Flash is in
hardware or software mode and I'll retest the 650 to see if it changes
anything. If it is a better performer, I'd be happy to keep it, though I
wish it had DirectX 11.1 support, and not just DirectX 11.

I've already boxed the new card back up in preparation for a refund or
store credit, though depending on what hardware issue is causing these
reboots, I may need that money for RMAs. I'm glad I have 30 days for
exchanges. Tracking this problem down has been difficult and I'm not done
yet.

I think I've ruled out the UPS. I kept the monitor connected to the UPS
because I was too lazy to unplug the other stuff plugged into it to just
hook everything to a regular surge protector to see if it makes a
difference having nothing at all hooked to the UPS. I'm just afraid these
sudden reboots, if caused by power problems, are going to damage
everything I've just bought. I can't take that. I'm about to have a
stroke over this because I simply can't afford to replace all this if some
faulty equipment that isn't new fries everything else I have. And I'm
just trying to get it up and stable I can try to earn some money writing.
Then computer problems won't be so stressful. lol If I had the available
cash, I wouldn't mind just replacing everything that's questionable.

Damaeus
  #17  
Old January 11th 13, 03:03 AM posted to alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia
Damaeus[_3_]
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Posts: 79
Default Need Advice to Replace GeForce 7950GTOC With a DirectX11 Nvidia Card

In news:alt.comp.periphs.videocards.nvidia, Paul
posted on Wed, 09 Jan 2013 12:03:50 -0500 the following:

And vice-versa when going back to the 7950. Give the
driver the chance to optimize settings for the newly
installed card.


I take it all back now. The GTX 650 is a LOT better than the 7950 GTOC. I
installed The Sims 3, which is the most recent game I have, and at 1920 x
1080, maxed out all the graphical bells and whistles (except distant lot
detail), spinning the camera around a full 60 x 60 lot was smooth and
wonderful to see. I put in the 7950 GTOC, changed the driver again, and
then set the graphics settings to the highest (except distant lot detail
again), and the animation was choppy and not impressive at all. It was
flat-out annoying.

So I put the GTX 650 back in and that's where it's staying. Interestingly,
I tried CoasterVille again on Facebook and the GTX 650 actually seemed to
be performing better than it did before. Maybe it just needed its
switches warmed up and loosened some with some activity.

I also tried Deus Ex, which is an older game that runs on DirectX 7. For
that one, both cards were actually about the same, but while I could
select 1920 x 1080 as a resolution, selecting that seemed to actually bump
it down to about 1024 x 768 or something. All the menus, controls, etc...
got larger instead of smaller. It definitely wasn't 1920 x 1080. I tried
a 1600 x 900, I think it was...or whatever the 16:9 resolution is. I
haven't memorized them yet because I'm new to widescreen computing. But
the game performance was the same with both cards. I just forgot to test
32-bit color with the GTX 650. With 16-bit color, the game was just ugly.

7950 GTOC's temperature in The Sims 3 went from an idling 58+ALo-C to 90+ALo-C and
the fan went to 40%. In Deus Ex, it only went to about 62+ALo-C.

The GTX 650's temperature in The Sims 3 went from an idling 25+ALo-C or so (I
don't remember exactly) to 47+ALo-C. In Deus Ex, it went to 32+ALo-C.

Well, I'm happy now. I've retired the 7950 GTOC, but it'll be nice to
have it as a backup. It's the only other PCIe card I have.

I'm hoping that the GTX 650's DirectX 11 support will pull out more eye
candy when I get Windows 8 installed.

Damaeus
 




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