Just had an unusual experience (well at least for me) trying to OC my video cards.  Granted this is the first time I've ever really tried with any "success".  The last card I tried to OC, was my 8800GTX which would crash with just one 1Mhz of clock increase of the core.

Anyway, I tried testing for stability with FurMark (and MSI Kombustor--which is basically the same thing), and found I was able to max out both the core (1200Mhz) and memory (1575Mhz) frequencies with no artifacts or hangs, and temps on both cards didn't get much above 62C.

I then lowered the voltages as much as I could while still maintaining stability.  After that I tried 3DMark11 to benchmark--excited to see just how much higher my scores would be!  However, 3DMark11 would crash instantly upon loading the first scene.  I also found that Heaven Benchmark would also crash.  So much for FurMark!

I set memory back to default and reduced the core frequency till I got Heaven to run.  3DMark11 was more finicky and required even a lower frequency before it became stable.

After bumping up memory frequency, I found I could max that out with 3DMark11, but my scores were horrible!  Dropping from P14454 to P9300!  As it turns out, my stock memory frequency gives me the best performance by far!  I also tried lowering the memory frequency below stock (including matching with the core frequency) and found that also reduced 3DMark11 score, but not as badly as increasing the Memory Frequency by 25Mhz above stock!--and that with maximum memory voltage of 1.7V!  There's no difference in performance when I set Memory voltage to 1.7V or the stock 1.6V.  Performance is reduced though when I lower Core voltage and/or Core frequency from the maximum 1.3V and 3DMark11's max stable speed of 1125Mhz.

So right now, I have my Core set at 1.3V-1125Mhz, and Memory is at stock: 1.6V-1250Mhz.

My benchmarks on ROF were disappointing.

Before GPU overclock: Average: 57fps, Minimum: 46; Maximum: 84
After GPU overclock: Average: 62fps, Minimum: 46; Maximum: 84

My 3DMark score went from P14014 to P14454

From stock CPU and GPUs settings to OC CPU (4.5Ghz) and GPUs:

ROF: Average 52-62;  Minimum 39-46; Maximum 78-84
3DMark11: P13586-P14454; Graphics: 14766-15243; Physics: 12193-13911

Welcome Hawk-I!

Thanks Kingsnake.

Hi guys,

Obviously I've been AWOL way too long.

Thanks Eco for the comments.  Too bad about the shade the trees are rendered as... that's rather odd.

I see you've found the tasks on condor-club.eu for Oahu.  I think the one I uploaded there was one I had based on actual weather conditions back in the summer of 2009.

As for Gunny needing something to shoot at... there is a competition mode where you use "knuckles"--a virtual tail on each player that is rendered to look something like a knotted kite tail.  The idea is to slice off each other's "tails"... The more you cut off [with your wings?] the more points you get.  Kingsnake and I tried it out a couple years ago actually.  Was pretty interesting--talk about energy management in a sailplane dogfight!

Gozr: gliderracing.com is a free place to download scenery.  One advantage too, is that you can download some of the sceneries by bittorrent if you like. We've recently decided on MNS to only host scenery that is realistic and has at least some decent quality, and fits other standards that haven't been completely well defined yet... In any case, it's not a complete list of scenery that's available like you'll find on condor-club.eu.

Yes, that's the scenery Gozr: Oahu HD V1.0 by flying.islander.  I wasn't thinking when when I first signed up to read the forums on condorsoaring.com's site, and selected "flying.islander" as my username.  I've kept my 'heritage' though, by using my callsign for racing online, Competition ID (TXS), and the by line on the scenery's flash screen.    Just the guy who manages the files on his server refers to me by my forum username, and the email address I use for the condor forums.

Just be aware that Condor uses DirectX7--which is unfortunate for a few reasons--one being that Nvidia doesn't fully support backwards compatibility with DX7 graphics in their Vista and Windows 7 drivers.  This means that if you're flying this scenery (the HD version), the sim will eventually crash--usually in 30 minutes or less.  If you fly very low, the sim takes longer to crash--and so chances are you'll crash the glider first.  Fly high, and you'll have only a few minutes....  Options: 1) download the Oahu V1.0 (MNS Version) instead (textures are half the resolution than the original--which of course makes things much grainier--but that's what I'm stuck with since 'upgrading' to windows 7 from XP); or 2)fly on a Windows XP machine; or 3)use an ATI card.

Gunny, here's some screenshots that I have on facebook--mostly just my flash screens... so, not exactly the best--might need to take some more screenshots when I get home.

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=633489&l=e68316905f&id=1652433676
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=633490&l=18f04bcdd7&id=1652433676
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=633491&l=2c276d2a19&id=1652433676
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=633492&l=583e52ff65&id=1652433676
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=591526&l=e4dde6d845&id=1652433676
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=591527&l=af4e69c3e6&id=1652433676
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=7910&l=6368745866&id=1652433676
The last picture shows where I was partially done with laying out the area around Pearl Harbor, and before color correcting the photos.

When you speak of overclocking with 4 sticks, are you talking about overclocking the memory or the cpu or both?  I haven't overclocked the memory--actually I did have it slightly overclocked (at 1077Mhz) prior to my problems with Windows 7, but currently had it set right at stock speed.  However, when I link it now, I can't do 1:1 without getting a speed of 1375Mhz, which I know will fail.  I've selected 3:2 to run further tests with Prime95, which gives me 977.8Mhz.  "Sync Mode" (whatever that is) gives me 733.3Mhz. 5:4 gives me 1173Mhz, which might be possible, but I remember in the past my OCZ sticks didn't seem to like being Overclocked much.  Are the ratios (other than 1:1) ok to use with four sticks, so long as they're "linked"?  Or do I need to buy bigger sticks so I can stick with just two, if I want to have anything (like just the CPU) overclocked?

Ah, maybe that could be part of my problem.  I've got the memory unlinked with 4 1Gb sticks.

Hardware:
MB: evga 680i
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (Conroe) 65nm Overclocked at 3.300Ghz (formerly 3.333Ghz for the last three years.  Stock is 2.4Ghz).
GPU: evga GeForce GTX 260 with 896 Mb (stock settings)
RAM: 4x 1GB 1066Mhz sticks of OCZ2N1068SR1G 5-5-5-15 2.1V(stock settings).
Bus: 366.7Mhz (stock 266Mhz)

I've recently put Windows 7 on my 3 year old rig, and have noticed that my system isn't as stable as it used to be... so, I've dropped my FSB down a little, and have been doing some more research on over-clocking techniques since I've gotten rather rusty with not messing with that in 3 years.

I read the article that Eco linked to in his sticky post to this forum section, but am confused as to how to determine where one's MB changes NB latencies.  I've found a couple other articles about the subject thanks to Google--but they all seem kind of ambigous (and confusing) to me.  There's much talk about 1066Mhz, 1033Mhz, etc as being typical "strap" thresholds where the NB changes latencies in most mother boards at these descrete frequencies.  However, the examples given make little sense to me, as the frequenices for the FSB don't seem to have any correllation to the NB frequency straps.  (Yes, I know the FSB is "quad pumped" for Intel chips), but all examples I've seen so far, the FSB x 4 doesn't seem to fall in the range they say the NB is at for a given latency.

One article said you have to experiment to find out where the straps are--run some kind of benchmarking software over a wide range of FSB settings?

Also, does it matter if your memory clock is unlinked from the FSB, or is it always better to run memory in some kind of ratio like 5:4, 3:2, 1:1?

Thanks for any help anyone could provide in this matter.

MNS West is hosting Oahu HD tonight at 7pm PST.  You can download the scenery pretty fast from http://www.gliderracing.com, since downloads at condor-club.eu are limited at times.

Yeah, I saw Gozr's link about the Cumulus add-on... interesting...  I don't have the slightest idea how to export textures to FSX... if you or someone here knows how and/or wants to, I could give you all the entire set all pieced together.  Then again, if we're going the FSX route, it should be able to handle 30cm resolution images right?  (Of course that would mean piecing all 800 pictures together again--as I reduced the resolution of each one from the original before assembling it too keep my computer from running out of memory--which happened anyway).

I guess there's no way to upload images here... just link to them, right?

Thanks Kingsnake.  Sounds like a nice idea Eco... sorry I only just now saw your responses.

Well, I'm finally finished updating it.  I'm going to create a few updated splash screens tomorrow, and have the 'full' version ready to upload to Condor Club this weekend.  I spent most of my time adjusting the color and blending the photographs with the surrounding ocean... of course, now that I see what I've done on a different computer with brighter monitors than my laptop, the blending doesn't look as great.

I've added buildings and trees now (mostly just around the airports).  The forest trees tend to be too tall, so I've included individual trees that I can control the size of... though I did throw in a couple small deciduous forests around a couple airports.  I've got skydivers to avoid at Dillingham and hang gliders to dodge near the south eastern point of the island.

Here's a link to one of the forum threads where I uploaded some screenshots...

http://forum.condorsoaring.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=10782&p=113986#p113986

Thanks Eco.  What is D0 stepping?  When you mention the EVGA X58 and Asus P6T, you're referring to two different motherboards, correct?  The X58 handles triple memory streams, while the P6T handles dual?

BTW, my current problem was indeed my graphic's card.  I thought for sure I had tested it with an old ATI X800 card I had, and observed the same issues of scrambled text on video post... Also, after some research figured out that usually when a CPU goes bad... it goes BAD, and nothing works... so I suspected my motherboard (after trying out the other two PCI-e slots with similar results).  When I was about to yank my motherboard out and send it back to EVGA, I decided to double check with my ATI card one last time, and it worked just fine!  (Which left me scratching my head--had I just had a vivid dream of taking the ATI card out of my old computer and testing it out with my current one, a week before?).

The sad part, is that I had registered my 8800GTX with EVGA 40 days after ordering it from newegg.com, and just found out that the limited lifetime warranty only applies if you register within the first 30 days!  I paid more money for that card than my cpu and motherboard combined.  I've decided for now just to replace the GPU, and put on hold building a new system, until I can justify spending the quality time of tweaking a new machine--something I can't really do, when most of my spare time has been trying to "beautifye" my Oahu Scenery, and get that project finished for once.

In any case, I appreciate your suggestions Eco... when I'm ready, I'll start buying those parts (unless something even more fun comes out before then).

Thanks for the suggestions Thunderbolt.

After reviewing CyberpowerPC on several different websites and forums, I'm amazed it is still in business.  I just wish there was a way to order the parts (not removed from the original packaging) from them, and put the system together myself.  Alienware seems to have become less uptight about using their odd sized power supplies, and locked out bios... which is good news, however, they're more expensive than what I can do for myself.

So, I think I'll stick to building something myself, perhaps with water cooling.

That is one of the funniest pictures I've seen in a long time...

[$2800 for an i7 960]

I'd like to get a system that can handle RoF well.

I like your system Thunderbolt, and was curious Eco, what system you have these days?

I've been pricing out various systems using the i7 chip... (i7 920 and 960s), motherboards, memory... and finding a lot of the pre-built computers that seem to be a lot cheaper than what I could build myself.

Has this been anyone else's experience?  Granted, some reviews I've read of various pre-builts leave me a little concerned about who's actually slapping these systems together.

Any suggestions?

I was looking at a
MB: Asus X58 DDR3 1600Mhz
Power: Ultra X3 1000 Watt
Memory: 12GB Corsair 1600Mhz 8-8-8-24
CPU: i7 920
Heat Sink: Cooler Master V8
Optics: LG Blue Ray
Thermaltake Tower
GPU: GTX 295
OS: Win 7 Home Premium

All running for $2520.89 or $2800 for an i7 960 instead.

Then there's the pre-built "CyberpowerPC" with an i7 960, with the same amount of ram, including 2x 1TB HDs (not priced above), Blue Ray writer, 800W power supply...

for $2149.99

Yeah, my first thought was that my GPU was over-heating / dying... but I swapped it out with an ATI card I have, and it was doing the same thing.  Also, I don't think it is a monitor issue, as it happens on all three of my monitors.  (Unless it's just a very interesting coincidence--as I haven't hooked the monitors up to another computer--but even that wouldn't explain the lock-ups, and the fact I can't boot into windows anymore).

Anyway, I didn't mean to hijack this thread with my computer woes.  Just curious about the new generation of cpus and Eco's post caught my eye.  I'm almost considering just buying a pre-built system... though sometimes I feel guilty about dumping so much money on things that depreciate / age so rapidly.